Oldshue writes a loose, relaxed prose, that of an unhurried natural storyteller with a wry affection for many of his...
The characters in this debut story collection confront minor crises and sudden shocks, the sort of narrative spectrum one might expect from an author who's also a medical doctor.
The elderly upstate New York couple hit by bad weather in the title story are also facing a neighborhood nearly emptied of its “first families,” a fact brought jarringly home when they crash into a car driven by one of the last (no one is hurt). Threats and loss recur in “Fergus B. Fergus” when a boy caring for a vacationing neighbor’s cats feels the “heart-pounding” terrors of a vacant house at night and then another sort of anxiety when one cat disappears on his watch. These two stories, which touch on people of the same rural New York community, and another concerning a troubled pregnancy and a Home Depot shopping trip, all bring to mind familiar Richard Russo territory. Oldshue also wields a dry humor that is especially effective in a story about an elderly woman disappearing from her nursing home. But Oldshue is better when he’s a bit unconventional. The psychiatrist in the long, meandering “Mass Mental” finds that a from-the-hip analysis for a couple he’s seeing may have caused the husband to murder his wife. An elderly Lithuanian relative whose wartime prison experience furnishes a project for a girl’s bat mitzvah offers an unusual angle on the Holocaust. A story about a gay male prostitute in 1978 and a confused married man ends with an unexplained death and a wife facing the new disease called AIDS.
Oldshue writes a loose, relaxed prose, that of an unhurried natural storyteller with a wry affection for many of his characters and a wide range of human interest.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60938-451-7
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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