A series of frustrating near-misses from an obviously talented writer.
Faith, keeping it or breaking it, is the theme that ties together a debut collection from Canadian novelist Redhill (Martin Sloane, 2002).
The opening tale, “Mount Morris,” illustrates Redhill’s strengths and weaknesses. Tom and Lillian’s marriage fell apart over whether to have kids, but for 12 years they have had cordial if edgy annual reunions. This year will be different: Tom has a new romance that prompts feelings stronger than any he had for his wife. Redhill writes gracefully; his characters are appealing. Yet Tom never delivers his big news, and a low-stakes story fizzles out. The closing piece, “Human Elements,” has similarly low stakes. Russell, a depressed poet, has retreated to a lakeside cabin. A young couple invades his space: Kate and Sylvain, who are tagging frogs for an environmental project, may be breaking up, but does it really matter? The details of frog life steal the show. In some stories, the stakes are high, but the resolution is botched. “The Victim, Who Cannot Be Named,” for example, shows Peter and Margot Bowman undone by the discovery of a three-way sex video involving their 17-year-old daughter. These calm, enlightened parents are suddenly at sea, and their domestic shipwreck is beautifully rendered. Then Peter turns into a quite improbable vigilante, ruining everything. “A Lark” also seems all set to strike sparks. Bergman is pushing 40, happily married, a middle-management type living in Toronto. On assignment in distant Calgary, he has a liberating affair with a young trainee at his company. But Bergman abruptly ends it, and the story winds down ever so slowly, with the adulterer home free and no payoff. Other tales here falter with a dubious premise. In “Cold,” Paul gets word that former college roommate Louis is in a funk after the collapse of his marriage and flies to Europe to help him through it. Yet Louis is the same bore he always was, and Paul’s sense of obligation is mystifying.
A series of frustrating near-misses from an obviously talented writer.Pub Date: March 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-73499-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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