What was once daring may now seem a little tame, but Coover’s influence endures, and this collection provides good evidence...
A gathering of short stories by Coover (Huck out West, 2017, etc.), the pioneering maven of postmodern experimentalism.
Over seven decades, Coover, who now teaches “electronic writing” at Brown University, has explored many modes of short fiction, from the near-expressionistic to the most disjointed stream-of-consciousness. Indeed, it is with the latter strategy that this gathering opens, with an onrushing story that suggests both madness (“I shout for his boys and for his wife and for anybody inside and nobody comes out ‘Goddamn you’ I cry out at the top of my lungs and half sobbin and sick and then feelin too beat out to do anythin more I turn around and head back for home”) and the biblical tale of Noah and all its divine oddity. The story following it, also from the 1960s, has a comparatively placid tone, even if it turns on horrific flatulence inside an office-building elevator. At the heart of many of the 30 stories collected here are what might be thought of as fractured fairy tales: the gingerbread house that lends its name to one story “is approached by flagstones of variegated wafers,” Coover writes, “through a garden of candied fruits and all-day suckers in neat little rows”; the antinomian sisters who, like bears, once visited a deserted island manor and “shat in the soundbox of an old green piano”; the lion who converses with the fox inside Aesop’s forest and says that it’s “a wise policy…to keep potential enemies where you can either watch or eat them.” There’s even an odd take on the old "Pied Piper of Hamelin" yarn, complete with nibbling on rats before they can nibble on you. Some of the stories are little-known; some, such as “The Babysitter,” much studied, anthologized, and imitated.
What was once daring may now seem a little tame, but Coover’s influence endures, and this collection provides good evidence for why that should be so.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-60846-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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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