A fresh, distinctly unorthodox, intellectually satisfying collection of finely tuned fiction.
A California writer with a degree in psychology won the Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize with this beguilingly cerebral collection of 14 stories.
Oliver Sacks comes especially to mind when a reader delves into Guista’s digressive first story, “Filling the Spaces Between Us,” about a psychiatrist searching for “soul” in his patients who finally comes around to what is ailing his wife: she can no longer discern emotions after an accident with her horse. Guista’s first-person narrators suffer psychically, whether from Catholic guilt, or pain, or the disorientation of medication. In “A Walk Outside,” another doctor offers extracts from the diary of an intriguing patient, prosaically named Norman P. Bowls, whose affliction of chronic inactivity—the state of being “frozen”—spelled 30 years of “sinking yet never quite drowning.” “Step Four” traces the obsessive-compulsive behavior of a husband and father who has a phobia for batteries; fed up with the “unwavering blandness” of his controlling medication and four-step therapy, he decides to become a free character for the day, experiencing emotions extremely, and with tragic consequences. The Catholic catechism forms the textual structure in “The Interviewer” as the narrator offers a probing Q&A about his own conscience (and others’) before he attains a sense of peace. Some of the stories achieve a surreal, thrillingly dark twist, like “The Front Yard,” about a husband on a beer bender who returns home to find that his wife has moved all the furniture to the front lawn after having had a vision that Catholics are going to blow up their house. More traditional stories treat childhood guilt and divorcing parents, like “California,” about the breakup of a migraine-suffering husband and his adventurous wife in Florida: his inability to grow (“You grow outward, not up,” she says) prompts her to move out to California for its alluring “verticality.”
A fresh, distinctly unorthodox, intellectually satisfying collection of finely tuned fiction.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-54672-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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