Only the strengths of “Coley’s War” give the collection its stature.
Debut collection of seven stories and a novella, by Arkansas poet and translator Williams.
All of these pieces have appeared in small literary presses. The first, “One Saturday Afternoon,” takes place in a small southern town just before WWII and concerns young boy Kelvin Fletcher’s typical Saturday at the movies, his finding a litter of baby rats he thinks are dogs and, when he takes them home, of reluctantly drowning them at his mother’s command. “The Year Ward West Took Away the Raccoon and Mr. Hanson’s Garage Burned Down” tells of Kelvin on Sundays going about the countryside with his preacher grandfather; of a school friend who drowns; and of Kelvin’s decision not to be a preacher. “The Wall” has the boy climbing a tower of chairs to peep through a hole into the girls’ locker room and coming to grief. While this amuses, the amusement lies in the event, not in the telling: You hear Twain or Salinger telling the same story and their voices stamping your memory with a permanent blue dye. In most of the tales, Kelvin weighs his religious belief and finds it fading, especially in “There Aren’t Any Foxes in That Cave,” while in “Truth and Goodness” he loses his virginity to Salina May Becker behind the church pulpit, with the red, green, purple, blue and yellow of the communion cloth under her bare body. The novella “Coley’s War” is about Kelvin and three college buddies, all led by Coley, who wants to go down to Latin America and join Martinez the revolutionary. The group sets off in a car. Sex, a supposed death, and brief jail time in Mexico follow as the Mexican police take the gringos for mucho dinero. Kelvin and Coley go on, guided by an old Mexican and by 19-year-old Marta. They meet stupefying horrors as Kelvin gets used to the idea of dying—as he should.
Only the strengths of “Coley’s War” give the collection its stature.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8203-2439-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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