A collection of prisoncentric stories that astonishes with its vibrancy and strong characters.
Goodwin’s potent debut drama is a series of stories about the U.S. rehabilitation system and how criminal acts affect the lives of inmates and victims alike.
In the book’s opening story, “Blank Slate,” neo-Nazi prisoner Ray Hazen seems beyond redemption. A violent man full of animosity, he’s pacified by the trauma he experiences after fellow inmates beat him severely. But even if Ray can’t remember his past atrocities, other prisoners and correctional officers can, and their mistreatment may cause him to rediscover his unsavory former self. Such is the theme among these stories: whether a convicted criminal can truly be vindicated. “Hater,” for example, follows racist Walker Calloway, who tries to start a life with a woman outside the prison walls, while Sarah in “One to One” faces inmate John Sloat, who raped her, and debates whether she should use the opportunity to kill him. Goodwin bolsters his collection by tying stories together not just thematically, but with characters and plotlines as well. Herbert Valentine, a psychiatrist at maximum security prison Orrington, crops up in several stories, sometimes merely as a supporting character. Other tales have even stronger links: the titular short story, which involves social worker Duane Case’s sessions with the four men on Orrington’s death row, is trailed by “The Victim’s Father,” about a man obsessed with retribution against his daughter’s killer—one of those death row inmates. The final two stories, “Unaccompanied Minor” and “Soul Mate,” take first-person perspectives of two criminals. The former’s protagonist is Jeff Zwerling, whose time in a hospital wing may lead to forgiving his neglectful father, while the latter, the longest of the collection, deals with the rather unsettling Keith Mueller, who sees nothing wrong in stalking a woman he doesn’t know. Despite the subject matter, Goodwin’s book isn’t nearly as bleak as readers may anticipate. Certainly there are instances of brutality, like inmates assaulting one another and prisoners’ unmitigated bigotry. But most stories leave room for hope; some even encourage it. The title story, in particular, has a final, eloquent image of a “pristine snowfall” “in the muffled silence of a winter day.”
A collection of prisoncentric stories that astonishes with its vibrancy and strong characters.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63413-015-8
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Langdon Street Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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