Marvels within marvels, from a writer whose prose possesses the equivalent of what musicians call perfect pitch.
A collection of gossamer yet substantial entertainments from the ineffably graceful stylist well on his way to becoming America’s Borges (or, perhaps, Cortázar).
If that seems paradoxical, so does Millhauser, who has spent decades perfecting a minimalist art that nevertheless encompasses the history of our culture, its predecessors and its oppressors. These most recent products of his fertile imagination can perhaps be faulted for too often echoing his Pulitzer-winning Martin Dressler or—more egregiously—his languid second novel Portrait of a Romantic. Still, the collection starts well with “Cat ’n’ Mouse,” presented as a narrative shooting script for a cartoon in which a homicidal feline is consistently outwitted by an introspective, borderline-studious mouse. The story works smashingly, both on the level of pure story and as a (perhaps partially autobiographical?) allegory of the contemplative temperament at odds with the exigencies of brute physicality. There follow three clusters of four stories each. Among the highlights in the section entitled “Vanishing Acts” is “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” which concerns the guilty narrator’s regret for his unintentional part in what caused the “vanishing” of a mousy, withdrawn high-school classmate, and the title story, which details the creation of a “game” that briefly engages the participation of distractible adolescents, while crucially transforming one girl who takes it too seriously. The best of the section entitled “Impossible Architectures” is “The Dome,” a deadpan paean to a sheltering superstructure whose protectiveness “has abolished Nature,” and “The Tower,” which concerns the human fallout from a structure thrusting upward and reaching to heaven. “Heretical Histories” explores further the passion to invent, control and manipulate—most memorably in a fable that celebrates trivial minutiae (“Here at the Historical Society”), and the history of an inventor who pushes representational art beyond its limits (“A Precursor of the Cinema”).
Marvels within marvels, from a writer whose prose possesses the equivalent of what musicians call perfect pitch.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26756-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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