Craftily built survival stories worthy of a wide readership.
Lubow’s (In a Chicago Minute, 2012, etc.) story collection skewers the world of marketing, with far-flung tales of business and geography mixed in.
The author’s background in advertising informs most of these 10 stories. Readers first meet the narrator of “Stick Shift,” an unnamed “cog in the big gray wheel” of a national retail company. Retail doesn’t thrill him, nor does the stifling cubicle in which he works, where he’s one of a group “that was encouraged to be creative but firmly disallowed to be so by the corporate torpor of the place.” What does thrill him, however, is wordplay. The story later takes on a lurid glow in the wake of a company member’s death; while driving a distraught colleague back to the office in the boss’s MG, the narrator considers the possibility of a carnal moment. But he also muses on mortality and loss and the tiny, banal images that can undo us. The elasticity of language is the adman’s bread and butter, and through it, Lubow’s narrators betray their bravado and vulnerability. In one of the strongest stories, “Incursion,” a man named Joshua drives into the deserted Appalachian landscape in the company car, in the “depressingly formal,” “[i]tchy in the leg” uniform of his company. It’s a long way from Madison Avenue to Cincinnati, and a hand-lettered sign at a rural gas station triggers a confrontation; the resulting events make good use of the strange vultures in the story’s prelude. This is the stuff of gutsy tragedy, with sudden swerves in action that will grip readers. The stories’ places, characters, and actions surge with elemental currents, and some primal urges aren’t quite obliterated by suit-and-tie decorum. Although the descriptions of cars and women are filtered through an expressly male point of view, lighter-weight topics also succeed: a man’s queasiness at a wedding strikes the edges of hilarity; a father talks to a girl whom his son is too shy to approach; and an aging man recalls the first time he met the woman who became his wife—now a quiet partner who shares sunblock with him on a topless beach.
Craftily built survival stories worthy of a wide readership.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1508599142
Page Count: 128
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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