While Kay’s midlife dilemma is not uncommon, Giles’s handling of this endearing heroine’s shucking off her “iron shoes” to...
Award-winning storywriter Giles (Creek Walk, 1997, etc.) shows that she can extend her gift to the longer form, in an edgy debut novel.
We first meet 40-something part-time librarian Kay Sorenson when she’s visiting her mother Ida in the hospital following a second leg amputation. Sounds dismal, but Ida, glamorous and larger-than-life even without her legs, is as brave and funny as she is difficult. Kay is dutiful yet wary, and with good reason: Ida’s illnesses have been the defining ritual of Kay’s life. Ida has been falling and breaking bones since Kay was born, a pregnancy, Ida later reveals to Kay, she tried to abort. Nevertheless, Kay has stuck close to home, so eclipsed by her mother’s histrionics and her father’s inscrutability, and so uncertain she and her brother, Victor, were ever truly loved, that she can barely acknowledge her own arrested development. Kay’s romance with the mythology of her parents’ cracked devotion to each other makes her life with her son Nicky and health-obsessed husband Neal, whose best shot at comfort is a stingy, “Oh, babe,” seem as warm and safe as an empty bank vault. So, to stave off the encroaching chill, and to delay her inevitable reckoning with the truth, Kay, like her mother and father, cracks jokes and drinks. Paradoxically, as the story unfolds, alcohol will serve everyone as both the potion of illusion and, after Ida dies from cancer, of clarity. The magic of this tale lies in Giles’s exquisite prose (a scent, a sound on every page without strain), her willingness to lay bare her characters’ warts with equal parts of mordant humor and affection, and in dialogue that sounds overheard instead of created.
While Kay’s midlife dilemma is not uncommon, Giles’s handling of this endearing heroine’s shucking off her “iron shoes” to navigate the terrain of a new life is an uncommon beauty.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85993-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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
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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