While exploring issues of self- and reinvention, of rootedness and disconnection, Pritchard brings her characters deeply and...
Set in the fictional towns and suburban subdivisions of what Pritchard (Crackpots, 2003) calls New Northwest Pennsi-hi-o, these subtly linked 11 stories give dignity to characters whose quirky secret natures are often overlooked.
The first story, “A Winter’s Tale,” in which a woman named Celeste walks home on a cold night after a deer hits her car, seems to go nowhere. But the loose-endedness is deceiving, for in the deeply moving “The Christening,” situated midway through the volume, Celeste reappears, first through the semi-demented eyes of her aged mother and then in stark reality as she cares for that mother and her tattooed but charming teenaged son while knowing that she has cancer. Similarly, characters grow in dimension as they reappear from story to story. Renata, who suffers a bad week in “Here on Earth,” works with Jack and Bobbie, who throw a divorce party for Bobbie’s sister in “The Honor of Your Presence.” In high school, Renata hung out with Gloria, Beryl and Vincent. Gloria describes the “spiritual topography” within people in the volume’s title story. While remembering her unhappy first marriage, she worries that her daughter, who has married Celeste’s son, is repeating her unhappy pattern. In “Late October, Early April,” Beryl gets pregnant with Vincent’s child shortly before he ships out to Vietnam. In “The Pink Motel,” Fanny, whose father disappeared when she was six and who never met Vincent, wears his MIA bracelet, claiming him as her lover in an attempt to re-invent her life. Elderly LaRue, whose brother Reggie mourns his daughter in the painfully sad “The Wonders of the World,” does not care for Fanny as a tour guide in “La Vecchietta in Sienna,” the final story. She is more concerned with the visitations she receives from the dead of Pennsi-hi-o on the streets of Italy.
While exploring issues of self- and reinvention, of rootedness and disconnection, Pritchard brings her characters deeply and movingly to life.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-61004-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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