And uneven and mismatched gathering. The best here remind us of the author’s crisp mastery of the form.
A workmanlike collection (his fifth, after Borrowed Hearts, 1999) from DeMarinis, author of eight novels.
The volume has three sections, the first and strongest consisting of seven takes on one man. In 1962, Moss is in college on the GI bill, trying to make his depressed wife Corliss happy and waiting for work with a Seattle defense contractor. When he and two buddies break into the physics lab at night to finish an experiment, they’re radiated by high-velocity neutrons from an accelerator. Years later, Moss concludes that “Sometimes the worst doesn’t happen.” In “The Bear Itself,” Moss and Astrid, his buddy Roddy’s wife, save another friend from drowning. Roddy screams at Astrid, “Will you please put on some clothes, you goddamned whore!” With typical DeMarinis pithiness, Moss observes, “If a handful of words can end a marriage, Roddy had found them.” “The Missile Gypsies” finds Moss, Corliss, and their baby son, Teller, transferred to North Dakota, where Moss collects data on the Minuteman missiles and betrays Corliss. In “Structure,” Moss is desperate because Corliss has left him and he fears he has prostate cancer. He has another affair and loses his job. “Freaks” is the darkest, most conclusive story. Just as the now-13-year-old Teller is called a “freak” by cheerleaders, Moss develops weird symptoms (double vision, impotence, lactating breasts). He has successful brain surgery, recovers, reconnects with his son. Less satisfying as a unit, the second section offers nine stories about men who are dead either through electrocution (“Handyman”), heart attack “atop the bimbo” (“The Life and Times of a Forty-nine-Pound Man”), a vicious animal on the desert (“Bête Noire”), the repercussions of going wild on an airplane (“Desperado”), or from beating a woman to death (“The Horse Dealer’s Lovers”). The last section—four rough-hewn coming-of-agers set in the ’40s and ’50s—could as well have been left out.
And uneven and mismatched gathering. The best here remind us of the author’s crisp mastery of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58322-637-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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