Samson’s new stories are warm and engaging, but some falter on their own affected charm.
A cycle of intersecting stories describes the lives that make up an English seaside community—their joys, regrets, and various embarrassments.
Samson is gifted in her understanding of and patience for the variety of human experience. In these stories, a piano tuner regrets his untapped talent as a musician; a mother worries that she doesn’t love her baby as she should; a young girl tries to get to know her long-lost father and finds herself saddened and exasperated by him at the same time that she's eager for his attention. These characters are all loosely connected to each other. The young mother has a sister who later becomes the piano tuner’s lover. The piano tuner’s former teacher is the mother of the fatherless girl. This strategy allows Samson to draw for her readers the outline of an entire community. We see how each character affects the others, for good and for bad. Though these characters are stationed in a small seaside town, they aren’t trapped there, and the scope of the book widens to encompass mainland Europe. A concert pianist considers her Jewish grandmother’s flight from Hamburg as she herself leaves the city after a performance. Another story describes the struggle by inhabitants of Soviet-occupied Poland to build a church. Samson’s prose, whatever her topic, is elegant and warm. She has a lyrical touch and a fine eye for detail. Unfortunately, she also has a penchant for preciousness which, when indulged, can be cloying. In her final story, a woman converses with her beloved cat, and the cat, in complete sentences and formal syntax, converses back. Other stories, too, border on cute in their overly tidy resolutions. Samson’s benevolence, though, and the good-heartedness of her observations, makes up for those too-sweet moments.
Samson’s new stories are warm and engaging, but some falter on their own affected charm.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-549-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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