Eight graceful stories in a debut collection from Norton's editor in chief: tales that vary greatly in subject and setting but rely on a similar sense of revelation, and on the ``weak magic'' provided by light. The play of shadow and illumination figures prominently in Lawrence's imagistic tales, whether he's rendering moments of hazy nostalgia or highlighting an edgy sexuality. In fact, the sexual stories, with their suggestions of forbidden love, often verge on the kinky. In ``Reunion,'' a Minnesota housewife whom friends consider ``logical'' and ``consistent'' decides to meet with her former lover from New York, a man she hasn't seen in ten years; but a degrading experience on the bus to Duluth turns her desire into a fierce appetite for violent revenge. ``The Gift'' explores sadomasochism quite explicitly in the tale of a married man, frightened by his own desire for another woman, with whom he explores rough sex. The sexual secrets of Central Park rambles reveal themselves in ``Desire Lines,'' in which a young woman's passion for bird-watching results in an unexpected act of violence. Lawrence also tells a number of stories from a young boy's perspective: A privileged youth in ``Legacy'' seeks his lawyer father's advice concerning a ribbon display promised him by his dying great-aunt; another boy grows up in a multigenerational, bookish household in which the men tirelessly discuss the aftermath of WW II, which took the health of the boy's uncle; and in ``Immortality,'' the narrator, who feared his great-aunt's obese adopted daughter, discovers in adulthood that she was probably his father's lover early on. Precious memories cloud the minds of dying old folks in airless tales of an old Connecticut farmer (``The Crown of Light'') and a great-grandmother at a family gathering (``Butterflies''). Lawrence's deliberate tales quietly develop considerable force, displaying nuanced, careful artistry.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-18474-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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