Four stories and a novella, linked by their depictions of conflict, mostly racial, in a second collection from McKnight (after The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, 1992). There's nothing particularly distinctive about McKnight's storytelling, though he tries for affect with first-person narratives. Still, the voices here all sound alike, though two shorter pieces—``He Sleeps'' and ``Palm Wine''—do seem to be told by the same character. Both concern an African-American researcher in Senegal who's collecting proverbs for his dissertation in folklore. In the first, he finds himself dreaming fecund narratives that reflect both the sexual mess he left back home and the torrid lovemaking he overhears in the next room. His retellings, though, are deflated by his native guide, who reminds him that dreams mean only one thing—you're asleep. The narrator's increasing frustration with the Senegalese leads to a lot of bad vibes (and defeats any sense of Roots-y solidarity). In the latter story, his quest for the legendary native elixir leaves the teller where he began: queasy, suspicious, and angry. The slangier narrators of ``The More I Like Flies'' and ``Boot'' complain about life stateside. The first is told by a young black civil servant who works in the Air Force Academy kitchen and resents his co-workers for their lack of sympathy and, once, their racial commentaries. Race matters less in ``Boot,'' about hierarchical conflict in the military and the narrator's regret that he sided with a whiny complainer rather than with his D.I. The long title piece explores interracial life on an Air Force base in Louisiana, where a bootstraps-and-stern-minded African-American family moves next to a white family whose racial attitudes are far more confused than anyone realizes, including a legacy of miscegenation, lust, do- gooderism, and simple friendship, all coming out in twisted fashion. Cultural conflict and racial wounds: McKnight sounds few unusual notes in this competent if not compelling volume.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-4829-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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
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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