A rough-edged building block in the career of a talented writer who’s getting better with every book. Cullin admirers won’t...
An uneven though very intriguing first collection by the Texas-born (now Arizonan) author of such vivid in-your-face fiction as Whompyjawed (1999) and Tideland (2000).
The eight longish tales here seem to have been written before Cullin found the edgy, bluesy voice that makes his novels so much fun to read. “History is Dead,” for example, relates the grim experiences of a young Cambodian woman separated from her family and working in a Cambodian forced-labor camp. “Wormwood” chronicles a Russian teenager’s delayed reaction to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, and the title story describes a black American Vietnam vet’s return with his racially mixed family to the country, long after the war. These stories, which feel dutiful and impersonal, are far less affecting than “Voice of the Sun,” a subtly constructed and very moving story about the complexities of filial love, family obligation, and sexual identity that define the relationship between two adult Japanese-American brothers. Pieces that appear closer to Cullin’s real turf include “Five Women in No Particular order,” a comic-grotesque tale of tornadoes, sexual irregularity, and strained female friendships, and “Viv’s Biding,” a finely detailed but unfortunately slack portrayal of a nonagenarian hanging feistily on, in a rundown retirement home. “Sifting Through” offers a probable earlier version of Asian-American adolescent Takashi (a pivotal character in Cullin’s recent novel The Cosmology of Bing, 2000 here shown as a “hero” who nevertheless feels unnoticed by and alienated from his peers. The most interesting story, “Totem,” details the misadventures of an Alaskan Native American kid who’s misled into criminal violence by the unstable best friend whom he secretly admires (and probably loves). The narrative meanders, and its possibilities remain largely undeveloped, but it’s filled with fresh, lively detail.
A rough-edged building block in the career of a talented writer who’s getting better with every book. Cullin admirers won’t want to miss it.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-8023-1336-1
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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