Standard domestic drama, nicely constructed, with some good characters and a strong storyline, yet predictable and somewhat...
Storywriter Solwitz (Blood and Milk, 1997) offers a grim debut novel about an unhappy Chicago family starting to come apart at the seams.
On the surface, Claire Winger seems fine—the middle-aged wife of an eye surgeon, she works as a nurse in a children’s hospital, has two bright teenaged daughters, and lives in a pleasant upscale neighborhood of Chicago—but she has unexplained seizures that arise out of nowhere, not to mention a pervasive and equally inexplicable sense of foreboding. Medications help keep the seizures under control, but Claire still feels frequently anxious and out-of-sorts. Her elder daughter, Nora, a demure high-school sophomore increasingly drawn to Christianity, worries that her mother may be suicidal. Younger daughter Hadley notices Claire’s moodiness but is too obsessed with boyfriends and her own popularity to pay much attention. Meanwhile, husband Leo tries to help but is ineffectual by nature and worn down by Claire’s relentless neediness. When he hesitates to defend her from an armed thug on the street one night, a fatal gap opens up between them. Claire throws herself into an affair with Bodey Marcus, a self-centered acting teacher, and she pays less and less attention to her girls. This encourages Hadley to neglect her studies to such a degree that she’s soon on the verge of flunking. Eventually, Hadley runs away from home when Leo and Nora are out of town, and Claire has to call the police to look for her. Like much adolescent angst, Hadley’s discontent hints at a deeper problem—one having more to do with her parents than herself. When she comes home, will things improve? Does she even have a home to come back to?
Standard domestic drama, nicely constructed, with some good characters and a strong storyline, yet predictable and somewhat flat all the same.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-889330-93-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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