Flawed but promising work from a writer whose manifest sincerity will in all probability spur her on to greater...
“Ascending” to the state of Israel and “Descending” thence to America suggest the binding themes of this debut story collection by a Boston writer who grew up on an Israeli kibbutz.
Five stories explore tensions between individual freedom and religious and nationalist solidarity, as experienced mostly by girls or young women born in or lately brought by their families to Israel. In a brisk elliptical style enlivened by clipped, often amusingly argumentative dialogue, Goldstein shows us a conservative household mortified by a visiting American cousin’s casual friendliness toward an Arab workman (“A Pillar of a Cloud”), a recent arrival from the US awkwardly adjusting to rigid dietary regulations (“Pickled Sprouts”), and a schoolgirl whose unlikely friendship with a recently orphaned classmate tempts her into unconventional and potentially dangerous behavior (“The Conduct for Consoling”). Deeper notes are struck in the subtly developed account of a rebellious high-school girl’s comeuppance at the hands of an unpopular classmate whose stoical courage reproves her self-indulgent “wildness” (“The Roberto Touch”), and in the story of a determinedly orthodox male teacher whose intolerance for his female students’ “immodesty” leads him to a humbling encounter with an embittered prostitute (“The Verse in the Margins”). Goldstein does less well with three stories set in America, though “Barbary Apes” develops an intriguing character contrast from a legend about indigenous Gibraltar monkeys, and a harsh picture of an industrious matriarch’s rescue of her sons from the carnage of the Lebanon War (“Anatevka Tender”) has a stylized, cryptic intensity reminiscent of Tillie Olsen’s famous story “Tell Me a Riddle.” All the stories are energized by Goldstein’s assured, eloquent narrative voice, but there’s an essential sameness to them that renders the book intermittently monotonous just as often as it’s vivid and engaging.
Flawed but promising work from a writer whose manifest sincerity will in all probability spur her on to greater accomplishment.Pub Date: May 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5135-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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