Imaginative work that shows how much women deserve better plots.
Being a woman is no walk in the park in this debut collection of intricately plotted, sometimes fabulist stories.
Women suffer, Wallman suggests, whether because they're concerned mothers, jealous lovers, or dieting wives. Sometimes men are the source of this pain, but often women are to blame. In "The Dead Girls Show," dead women (like the Hanged Girl and Arabella, the anorexic) put on a ghastly show where men can come and ogle their emaciated bodies and broken necks. But it's the no-nonsense strippers who see the dead girls as a threat and beat them up. Competition among women is also at the heart of "Senseless Women." A nurse named Miriam becomes obsessed with a patient who speaks incessantly even though she has lost her mind. As their histories merge, it becomes clear that Miriam's fallen prey to jealousy and drifted from her family. Plot twists and aha moments drive many of these pieces, sometimes successfully, as in "The Malanesian," which moves between the story of a runaway teenager and that of an affluent couple and their foreign maid until the two narratives come together with a satisfying pop. In "Only Children," however, a plot swerve cheapens an otherwise shrewd exploration of stepparenting. Indeed, when Wallman hews closer to realism, she shows off her considerable talent for expressing things dangerously thorny and fiercely true. In "Junk Food," which is about nothing more and nothing less than a mother spending the night with her ailing newborn, the protagonist reckons, "She did not wish she was in Italy. She did not unwish the baby. She was caught in the suffering of wanting to wish these things, wanting even to remember them clearly, and running up against a blockage of pain knitted from love and hormones."
Imaginative work that shows how much women deserve better plots.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62534-518-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Massachusetts
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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