There’s some inconsistency here—the opening tale in particular seems subpar—but, still, this is an auspicious beginning for...
A debut collection of clever, deftly written stories, by an author who’s appeared in such places as the Kenyon Review, North American Review, and the Missouri Review.
The 14 tales exhibit a refreshing variety of types—male and female, young and old, beautiful and ugly—but Hamel’s favorite is the modest 30-something who realizes that his or her view of the world remains as confused as it was in childhood. In “The Nemesis,” a shy white-collar worker finds herself drawn to the office’s resident “asshole,” having daily lunches with him for reasons she can’t explain. “Go” presents a 35-year-old heroine whose mother depends on kitsch to liven up their relationship, and the two of them jokingly (but eerily) treat an inflatable doll modeled on Munch’s The Scream as if it were a baby. The title character of “Myra” is an older woman who, trying to prevent future women from being named Myra, brings two other elderly Myras into her life. Hamel delights in shrewd understatement, and her resolutions are often subtle and mysterious. In simple but artful language, she presents a wealth of witty observations on her characters. In “The Years in Review,” a married couple “disdained divorce as unimaginative and overidealistic—tacky American, like Lotto or hair transplants.” The heroine of “The Nemesis” understands that her father “seemed to enjoy sailing, but what he really enjoyed was humiliating pretenders to the nautical lifestyle.” In “Toys,” a woman thinks of her husband, “He was more or less the same man she’d met ten years before in a porta-potty line outside a Metallica concert.” But comic observation isn’t the only show here; Hamel’s characters are often wounded, sometimes stranded, and she invokes powerful sympathy for them. Her subtly comic tone recalls Lorrie Moore, who’s also shown that she can make exceptional stories from middling ideas.
There’s some inconsistency here—the opening tale in particular seems subpar—but, still, this is an auspicious beginning for a very talented writer.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8262-1356-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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