Vintage Stone. Enough said.
Alienated, angry outsiders stalk the dangerous edges of their unraveling lives in the great American novelist’s collection of grim short fiction.
The mordant pleasures begin with a perfectly chosen epigraph, much too good to give away. Then we plunge headlong into Stone country (Bay of Souls, 2003, etc.) with the title story’s unsparing portrayal of a weary criminal lawyer’s addled relations with his nothing job in a nowhere place, and with a female prison psychologist whose demons are more than a match for his own. Hemingway is skillfully channeled in the perfectly pitched “Honeymoon,” taut as a trip-wire as it shows a newly married man sinking under the weight of his obsession with his ex-wife, and in “Charm City,” the heartless tale of a weak married man courting romantic adventure, the predatory woman who expertly encircles him and the momentum of self-destruction that consumes every wasted life herein displayed. Stone stumbles slightly in his portrait of an incipiently burnt-out scriptwriter and the emotionally unstable actress who sashays ever more destructively in and out of his life over the years (“High Wire,” which echoes a little too closely his 1986 Hollywood novel Children of Light), and in “The Archer,” which chronicles the outrageous sociopathology of a vagrant college art prof whose middle age, we guess, might be the one J.P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man would grow into. Mastery re-emerges in “From the Lowlands,” the crisp, Ambrose Bierce–like fable of an electronics mogul whose lavish western mountain retreat can’t insulate him from the shadowed clutch of nemeses approaching. Equally fine is “The Wine-Dark Sea,” in which a renegade journalist crashes an island policy conference hosted by an increasingly unhinged U.S. Secretary of Defense—Caliban meets Conrad’s “Mistah Kurtz,” as incisive literary allusions and pistol-whip prose conspire to create a hilariously funereal Götterdämmerung.
Vintage Stone. Enough said.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-618-38625-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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