Crafted writing mixed with good intentions, in a result not especially memorable.
Van Winckel’s third story volume (Limited Lifetime Warranty, 1994; Quake, 1997) shows her flying between the capable and the familiar.
The eight pieces here are appealingly linked—each about or told by a woman associated with Curtain Creek Farm, a commune (euphemized later to “intentional community”) founded 30 years ago, back in the ’60s. For openers (“Sometimes He Borrowed a Horse”), a young woman named Pauline learns that a ne’er-do-well cousin, a minor outlaw, has inconveniently produced a baby—which Pauline takes back to the commune, names, and raises. Life on the farm can be of considerable interest: the commune’s first death (of a well-loved woman named Lila) and how the group ought to respond to it (“Immunity”); a cougar that prowls the vicinity and terrifies not only the children but their elders (“The Land of Anarchy”); the commune’s decision to mount a Web site (to help sell its homemade products), and the affair that starts between the Webmaster and one of the women (“Making Headway”). At the same time, so much prevailing and principled goodness, while at times strengthened by a sturdy irreverence, risks declining into banality (on guns: “Not here, okay? We’re not about violence”). Later stories portray a younger generation, and though the pieces can have their strengths (as when a woman 15 years his senior falls in love with the dead Lila’s son, in “The Lap of Luxury”), Van Winckel turns to increasingly unoriginal material—disease-stories, for example (a sister with lupus in “The Expectation of Abundance,” a mother with Alzheimer’s and a lover maybe with AIDS in “Treat Me Nice”)—and the pieces flatten dramatically as the quotient of goodness rises.
Crafted writing mixed with good intentions, in a result not especially memorable.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-89255-250-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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