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
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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