A first collection from Turchi (The Girls Next Door, 1989): 11 stories written in a mock-Hemingway prose—often too stilted for the subtle emotions he hopes to evoke—about sad sacks, ordinary lives in crisis, served up with huge dollops of minimalism. In the title piece, Tracy, a waitress and would-be actress, dates Walter, a much older man with a magic trick or two up his sleeve: ``Walter was a place she had to leave.'' It takes her far too long to do so, however, for she ``wondered how she was going to give their relationship a final scene.'' Turchi seems to believe in ambiguous endings—endings that here, anyway, mostly suggest the stories are maybe two thirds evolved, raw experience and good ideas not yet fashioned into art. In ``Alligator,'' for instance, teenager Blair is on the road with brother Bill and her parents. When the family spends the night with old friends (who aren't exactly friends anymore), the adults drink and chatter Raymond Carver-style while Blair thinks her ordinary thoughts and finally has a drink herself. ``Everything I Need,'' though, is promising: Cory's sad-sack life is juxtaposed to a radio talk show he becomes nearly addicted to, but the fiction tries to dovetail a hit-and-run radio story with Cory's own hit-and-run, whereupon he calls the talk show to confess. Finally, the piece tries for too much and loses credibility. Of the rest: ``The Kitchen'' is amusing (a waiter, a college dropout, gets the plot of Moby Dick confused with his restaurant job), and in ``Layover,'' by contrast, a middle-aged man whose daughter is getting married decides his life is over and sits forever in an airport hotel room. One darn thing after another in short newspaperese paragraphs: the effect is largely monotonous or gimmicky.
Pub Date: May 28, 1991
ISBN: 0-525-24996-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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