Refreshingly unsentimental reminders of the mysteries and magic of life from a wise and accomplished writer.
Eleven stories in a second collection (after I Am Having an Adventure, 19TK) from novelist, essay writer, and practicing pediatrician Klass (Baby Doctor, 1992, etc.) that detail with compassion those times in women’s lives when medicine and love hover in attendance, sometimes as helpless bystanders, at other times as triumphant saviors.
These are women’s stories in the best sense: some are closer to magazine fiction—where they have appeared in publications like Glamour and Redbook—others, like the title story, are accomplished tales that resonate as they describe the treacherous vulnerability of life. In that O. Henry winner (one of three here), the narrator, a pediatrician and mother of two, muses on the helplessness of love and modern medicine, “both useless,” as she tries to comfort her stepsister, whose baby has died from SIDS, as well as face up to her own fears about her children’s mortality. Friendship between women is another theme Klass explores with sensitivity and a nicely dry wit. In “For Women Anywhere,” Doris, a friend since high school, comes to help when Alison, single by choice, gives birth. “Freedom Fighter” describes how a mother and obstetrician, just weeks away from delivering her third child, pretends she is a freedom fighter able to make “ revolutionary gestures,” as she spends a weekend touring New England with an old friend; and in “The Province of Bearded Fathers,” Willow, whose own life is going nowhere, helps her friend Janet, a scientist who has charged her boss with sexual harassment, to understand that she is not responsible for his suicide. Other notables deal with the parents of a strong-willed but sensitive child who must respond to complaints that she’s disruptive in school (“The Trouble with Sophie”); a divorced woman’s fierce love for her ill son (“Rainbow Mama”); and a single mother’s mixed emotions when she finds an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve (“City Sidewalks”).
Refreshingly unsentimental reminders of the mysteries and magic of life from a wise and accomplished writer.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-10960-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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