The stories that begin with the most surreal premises—the melding of man and squirrel in “The Beginning of All Things,” the...
Spoiler alert: Although plenty of characters survive these 21 stories, there’s no obvious prescription that fulfills the promise of the collection’s title.
Some storytellers are realists, some fantasists. Egerton (Everyone Says That at the End of the World, 2013, etc.) starts most of these tales in the guise of an earnest regionalist before swerving into unknown, comically unsettling depths. Sometimes the movement from realism to fantasy is as sudden as the springing of the trapdoor that awaits the losers of the spelling bee in “Spelling” or the rage that overtakes a father trying to assemble his daughter’s Christmas presents in “Arnie’s Gift.” Sometimes the journey is more gradual, as in the narrator’s increasingly dissociated odyssey from California to Texas in “Of All Places” or the predictable rise and fall of the novelist in “The Fecalist,” who enlivens a party hosted by a friend who’s just trashed his latest book in a review by relieving himself on the offending copy of the New Yorker. And once in a while, the premise itself is crazy, as in “Lazarus Dying,” which shows the tribulations of Lazarus after his recalling to life. Egerton, bless him, is equally at home writing about Jesus camps (“The Martyrs of Mountain Peak” and “Heart Thong”) and penises that are more than just phallic appendages (“Pierced” and “Lord Baxter Ballsington”).
The stories that begin with the most surreal premises—the melding of man and squirrel in “The Beginning of All Things,” the hero’s irrational fears in “The Adventures of Stimp”—are more piquant than gripping, but the sudden descents from domesticity into madness in “Christmas” and “Tonight at Noon” manage to be at once creepy and disturbingly funny.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59376-522-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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