Loose, tentative, and without clear point: debut stories that add up to very little in the end.
A rather anemic first collection of eight stories by Chicagoan Moore.
All here concern the tribulations and hopes of young, bright, frustrated women who can’t quite figure out how to make their way in the real world. Mary Louise, in “The Language Event,” has an unhappy reunion with her brother Richard at the Indianapolis 500—where she is harassed by drunken rednecks and in wistful tones recalls the upbringing she and her sibling had on Air Force bases (“Who did I think I was to sashay into my brother’s life, have our little pink reunion just the way I imagined it, all Andy Griffith and sunshine, and return to my sparkling white-wine three o’clock life?”). “Big Pink and Little Minkie” is narrated by a secretary who teaches playwriting at a Chicago university at night; in the story, she goes Christmas shopping and fantasizes about the lives led by the other passengers on the bus. “Once, In Hamburg” describes the adventures of college girls who take a summer trip to Europe, lose most of their money, and are abducted by evil-minded Turks—only to be saved by the quick thinking of one of them. “A History of Pandas” is about the bittersweet reunion of two sisters after one of them has lost a husband, killed while stationed overseas with the Air Force. The title piece concerns a group of young women who get together, hang out, gossip about men, and tell each other tales that may or may not be completely true. The young woman who teaches art in “Rembrandt’s Bones” is unhappy over the death of her beloved aunt and the suicide of one of her students.
Loose, tentative, and without clear point: debut stories that add up to very little in the end.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-0989-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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