A debut collection that offers a brilliant image of small-town life in Montana. Each of these eight stories revolves around dry-fly trout fishing on the Elkheart River, near the small town of Travers Corners that's been around for 120 years or so. While this kind of terrain has been well and sufficiently rendered before (Norman Maclean comes to mind), Waldie makes it fresh. His most moving piece is ``Travels,'' about a worn-out, despairing musician who rents space on the Elkheart River for his mobile home, sits and fishes, strums his guitar and is slowly, quietly, believably rejuvenated, deciding that ``there is nothing on God's green earth that could make this place any better.'' Other tales focus on Judson C. Clark, who returns after a spell in the outer world and sets up a boatyard for building his own handcrafted float boats. Jud's expertise as a guide to the best fishing edges and pools on the Elkheart are frequently called upon, while Waldie deftly uses the obsession for fishing shared by his characters to reveal the inner nature of visitors and townsfolk alike. As Jud says: ``Fly fishing isn't a sport; basketball is a sport. . . . Fly fishing isn't a parlor game; Monopoly is a parlor game. . . . Fly fishing really is: one of life's most pleasant pastimes.'' Does that reduce a passion to a pastime? Not at all. In these stories, Jud takes an elderly blind man fishing in a heavy rain. He also recollects his first lover, and the sight of her swimming in the river. Meanwhile, a titled, wealthy descendant of D. Downey, one of the town's founders, arrives from England to look into his past by fishing with Jud. Hardly anything happens, but by book's end it's hard to resist the impulse to pack up and head for Montana. Sheer heaven on a trout stream.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55821-533-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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