We are left with a sense of wasted material: so many lives, seen only in passing.
Joern’s second work of fiction (The Floor of the Sky, 2006) spans 50 years in the life of a large family on the Nebraska prairie.
Seventeen linked stories comprise a stripped-down family saga, but the stories are not compact and well-shaped, with the exception of the excellent “Ghost Town,” a grim tussle over the custody of a child. The period covered is 1930 to 1979. Gramp Preston is the patriarch, a stubborn old farmer who works land he has leased. His refusal to buy land will doom the family and cause great grief for his son Jake, another farmer, but his folly is partially obscured by other developments. It’s a very crowded field, and you need a scorecard to keep track. Jake will marry Alice, who’s many years his junior and the step-daughter of his sister Mary. Alice’s two sisters will get their turn in the spotlight before fading away. Eventually Joern narrows the field to Jake and Alice and their three kids. Once Jake is forced to abandon the land and farming, “he’s lost his best self.” He might have been a tragic figure but he’s too dull and passive; a rough patch with Alice (abuse, jealousy) is suggested but not pursued. Much later he will be diagnosed with Parkinson’s and a quiet life will sputter out. It’s Alice who holds the family together, but here again Joern’s characterization is not sharp enough to throw her into relief against the constant challenges of daily life. Somehow their kids will do OK for themselves, marry and have kids of their own (one paragraph alone announces seven new additions to the family tree), but by 1979 the family is so scattered that the final insight that “they are bound…by blood and history” seems like a pious afterthought.
We are left with a sense of wasted material: so many lives, seen only in passing.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1619-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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