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WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE

STORIES

Carver's spare voice remains distinctive in this new collection of stories (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, 1977, was his first). Scary in how quickly they unfold, the stories prove to contain within their small dimensions a frequent radicalism of emotion, a back-against-the-wall-ness that's startling. The speech-like titles—"Why Don't You Dance?," "Tell the Women We're Going," "I Could See the Smallest Things," "One More Thing"—act as false reassurances, dishes from under which Carver yanks the tablecloth. Domestic situations—mostly of leaving, of disappointing—predominate, narrated often in the form of one character telling another a story of self-compromise which neither of them can wholly bear. The very best stories here—"The Bath" (a dying child, the eerie spaces he clears) and "After the Denim" (an elderly couple and a hippie couple at bingo night, with the utter impossibility of ever lining lives up parallel)—both suggest, nearly unforgettably, that the most dangerous thing that any of us own is the past. "What people won't do!" comments an innocent, if vacuous, lover in the title story—and you sense Carver in the background, knowing all too well what people will do. Yet for all the true lugubrious anarchy we're so economically reminded of here, Carver's fiction may be less original than it seems. Dependent on a Jack Benny-ish deadpan, on the ironic situation that bends itself in two and then can't be re-straightened, Carver is essentially writing John O'Hara stories—but with all the water wrung out. The dialogue is faultlessly non-sequitur; the characters are often simultaneously released and terse (thanks to liquor); violence is daily and unremarkable. These are stories, in other words, strictly about mores, not morals—and if looked at in the long literary view, they can seem thin, sneakily sentimental, all tone. Still, as artifacts of American culture right this minute, they are mightily impressive and, at their best, invested with a fiercely humane pathos.

Pub Date: April 20, 1981

ISBN: 0679723056

Page Count: 180

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1981

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

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

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

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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