A bleak vision, tempered by sensitive affection for human beings in all their frailty.
Short-story master Bausch (Someone to Watch Over Me, 1999, etc.) probes the tensions that seethe in families and marriages in three novellas, one previously unpublished.
“Requisite Kindness,” the new work, seems at first to cover the familiar territory of men who screw up and women who are tired of picking up after them, which is interesting enough, especially since Bausch’s dialogue and character insights are as cogent as ever. But the tale deepens as it moves into the head of a man tending his dying mother, exploring his fears and regrets over a failed marriage and damaged children. The mother’s passing is treated with a sad tenderness quite different from the cold finality of a suicide that drives the narrative in “Rare & Endangered Species,” deservedly well-known as the title piece in a 1994 collection. As Bausch explores the fraught lives of Andrea Brewer’s husband, children, and various people more loosely linked to her suicide, we see couples trying to reach each other across an abyss of guilt, anger, and shame: when one husband tries to stop an argument by saying “I love you,” his wife snaps, “You use that like a club.” Yet the tale expresses hope too, especially in its closing with the birth of the granddaughter Andrea will never see. “Spirits,” from a 1987 collection by the same title, also swerves to a cautiously happy ending after delving into a young English professor’s thoroughly nasty experiences while apartment-sitting for an older faculty member with a weakness for drink and vulnerable young women. At the same time, the young man’s former landlady is fundamentally unnerved by the discovery, all over the local TV news, that her ex-husband is a serial killer of little girls. “You think you understand a man’s spirit when you look in his eyes and he’s your live-in partner for three years,” she shudders—but she didn’t, and in Bausch’s world most people are strangers even to those they love best.
A bleak vision, tempered by sensitive affection for human beings in all their frailty.Pub Date: July 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-057183-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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