Intimate portraits of loneliness and longing.
A captivating debut collection probes the trauma of being human.
In 15 assured, haunting, and deeply empathetic stories, Hoagland imagines characters struggling with loss and beset by a disquieting, persistent sense of the fragility of life. A mother reacts to her parents’ wartime deaths by reverting to childhood, shrinking until she becomes “a tiny shape” requiring care from her adolescent daughter. A young woman stunned by her teenage brother’s suicide wishes she had seen warning signs. “I’m still just stuck as the unfruitful, albeit disappointed survivor,” she admits, as she replays her last conversations with her brother, innocuous exchanges filled with “idioms, clichés, old wives’ words.” A father, realizing he cannot protect his maturing daughter from harm, wishes his world could remain “intact,” like “an uncut peach.” Like many of Hoagland’s characters, he feels overcome by “the shape of loss he was afraid may someday loom over him.” A few of the 15 stories, most previously published in literary journals, evoke the slyly surreal worlds of Lydia Davis: “American Family Portrait, Clockwise From Upper Right” depicts ghosts, “gendered remains, hollowed beauty, amazing absence,” and a mother’s “head tilt of love.” In “Six and Mittens,” the narrator, diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia, reveals her imaginary friends, who sometimes erupt like “a noise in your brain that hurts,” and describes in chilling detail the fierce conflict between her parents, at “wit’s end” over how to treat her illness. Several characters have been traumatized by violence: An elderly woman recalls her complicity in the execution of witches in 17th-century Salem; a dinner guest recalls an Aztec feast that devolves into bloodshed; an Iraq War veteran and a woman whose parents died in a murder-suicide confront the unlikely possibility of becoming “a normal, happy couple.” In their quiet revelations, Hoagland’s characters give voice to the disquieting fears and dark secrets that, as one character puts it, produce “heartbreaking revisions of our world.”
Intimate portraits of loneliness and longing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949199-21-5
Page Count: 168
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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