Sadly, stories with a potential too insufficiently realized to deliver sustenance.
From novelist Quinn (High Strung, 2003), an oddly flat first collection that deals mostly with overly familiar domestic issues.
In “Dough,” a young woman with a “peaceful father” and a mother who went overnight from showgirl to paralegal, spends time with her grandmother, who has “rosebud nostrils” and is suffering from dementia. Her mother comes by one evening and catches the girl in flagrante with her boyfriend, a bread maker. Yet the story is too quiet to be memorable. A woman’s experience of rape is associated in her mind with CNN’s reports of American astronauts, ideas that merge in a conclusion that doesn’t work (“Back on Earth”). In “Endurance Tests,” a divorced mother connects her young son’s episodes of playing dead after his dog dies with the endurance tests she and a girlfriend tried with each other when they young, concluding that nothing was enough to prepare them for adult life. The inconclusive “Shed This Life” follows a woman whose parents died when she was in high school as she now leaves a boyfriend she met in the dentist’s office (where she works) after she let him know she’s pregnant. Dalton’s language is too pat (“Ted is looking at me like a man not quite recovered from Novocain, mouth breathing and he doesn’t even know it”), her character’s motivations unclear. “How to Clean Your Apartment” gives us a young woman trying to break up with a boyfriend while drinking whiskey and preparing to throw out clothes, gifts, junk. It’s saved from dullness by witty index subheads (“Screening calls: brief arguments for, 7.61”; “Therapy, cheaper alternatives to, 9:07”) but closes with the same old ending. The overlong title story gives an account of the narrator’s breakup with her boyfriend, told in tandem with the saga of her parents’ separation, her mother’s depression and her grandmother’s controlling temperament. Dalton gives each equal weight, robbing her tale of drama and emotion.
Sadly, stories with a potential too insufficiently realized to deliver sustenance.Pub Date: April 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-7055-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
