Poet Block’s story debut is a find: droll tales full of real, rumpled, irony-laden life. Even the weaker links here—the more linear stories—offer their passing if humbler pleasures, as in the tales of a high-school band whose leader marches it actually out to pasture (—The Gothenburg Marching Band—), a farmer who keeps a chimpanzee (—A Bed-Time Story—), or two toughs so jealous of a local boy made good that they want to murder him (—The Stanley Andrews Story—). When a nun, though, runs out of gas outside a farmer’s house (—St. Anthony and the Fish—), then moves in and transforms his life, the result deepens gracefully into real seriousness (—At night, sometimes, Ned could feel . . . nothing creep right up to the house and almost stare in the windows—). Though Garrison Keillor is better on the air than on the page, Block can catch the tone and pace of an oral Keillor and tack it down for keeps, as in —Land of the Midnight Blonde,— about life in the Fargo of today. And at his very best, Block turns the dreariness of existence in Nebraska or the Dakotas into something approaching musical hymns to humanity—in stories like the 1918-set —Zadoc Xenophon Cannot View Bright New Moons. Can Vera Montague?—, about a spinster liberated through learning to type; or —Demon in the Closet,— the positively uproarious tale of a pregnancy in the family; or —The Dirty Shame Hotel— itself, about the denizens of a flea-bag hotel, which has the bleakness of an Edward Hopper painting, the happy tumult of a Calder circus, and the lyricism of a Dylan Thomas—and features, among other remarkable characters, a professor set on explaining —the physics of human desire— by proving that —both light and gravity work on the principle of suction.— A Sherwood Anderson for our time—funny, ironic, inventive, brimming with sympathy.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-89823-187-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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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