Superlative short fiction, and an arresting debut.
A debut story collection about Los Angeles’s various hopeless classes.
An alcoholic is haunted by the wife who killed herself and their daughter in “Love Lifted Me.” A failed actor moves back to his mother’s house in “The Hero Shot.” Insanity overwhelms a stalker in “Everything Beautiful is Far Away.” And, in the title story, a moderately successful and deeply numb office dweller jerks back to life. Like the rest of Lange’s protagonists, these men are misfits, screw-ups and sociopaths, and these stories capture them at the moment when their brittle, circumscribed lives finally shatter. The one exception is “Bank of America,” which depicts a sublimely average family man looking forward to relaxing after he completes his final heist. This superbly crafted tale was chosen for The Best American Mystery Stories 2004, and, in its current company, it presents the reader with a pleasing irony: The gun-toting bank robber is the most gentle, least violent character in the collection. That Lange is equally adept at creating lowlifes, nice guys and all the men who fall somewhere in between says a great deal about his abilities and his style. He provides his vividly real characters with a space in which they can finally release all the emotions—the rage, the longing, the bewilderment—that they work so hard to suppress, and he compels his creations to a level of honesty they’ve evaded with drugs, alcohol and paranoid delusions. Even when this release is self-destructive, it’s also a kind of grace. The men who people this collection may engage in macho posturing, but their author never does.
Superlative short fiction, and an arresting debut.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-01736-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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