A second collection from a former winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award (The Long White, 1988): ten mildly inspired stories that, like interesting inflatables, could have used an extra breath or two to bring them into a taut, emotionally compelling form. Dilworth shows a strong sense of place, but her ability to evoke the inner territory of longing seems less acute. Besides locale (the settings are mostly in Michigan and Pennsylvania) what unifies these tales are the alternative routes people take to fulfill their frustrated desires for human intimacy. In “Keeping the Wolves at Bay,” a son on the eve of his wedding travels to Europe with his deceased father’s gay lover—and decides to cancel his misguided marriage plans. “Three Fat Women of (Pittsburgh Just Visiting) Antibes” features a trio of friends who discover that the warmth of their argumentative friendship compensates nicely for their failed attempts to find love. The women of the title piece are beautiful strangers who arrive in a small Michigan town, have a drink in a bar, then disappear, compelling a lonely local to cross an icy lake to find them again. In “Awaken With My Mother’s Dreams,” the strongest story here, a daughter gains knowledge from her mother’s attempts to overcome isolation, even as her sisters protest the dangerous kayak fling the mother insists on taking. No story disappoints, but neither is any richly engaging. Dilworth often attempts to dramatize the conflicts of her characters by setting them in stark, unforgiving places: the harsh winter cold of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; the soggy gray of western Pennsylvania; a volcano near Hawaii that erupts obscurely, with no witnesses to view it. But while these landscapes are cleanly molded, their implications fail to illustrate or justify the blandly evoked lives of such people and their one-dimensional appetites. The result: a gathering of sagging forms, promising in outline, but lacking distinct shape.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8142-0812-6
Page Count: 220
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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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