Nadler is a writer’s writer, a fine observer of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of character.
Reflective stories about family relationships—parent-child, grandparent-child, brother-brother, husband-wife—with a focus on generally nonobservant Jews.
Nadler seems to know his characters inside-out and spins out their foibles and frailties in a leisurely fashion. In the first story, “In the Book of Life,” Abe Rivkin has a brief fling with the seductive but manipulative daughter of his longtime friend and business partner, Larry Reinstein—and then discovers that Larry has been having an affair with Abe’s wife. In “Winter on the Sawtooth,” Josh returns home after four months at Stanford to find out his mother is having an affair with the teacher of her memoir-writing course. While Josh’s father knows but doesn’t approve of his wife’s dalliance, Josh, who during his first semester has started to take religion seriously, is angered by his father’s passivity as well as by his mother’s infidelity. In “The Moon Landing,” two brothers, Charlie and Dave, try to come to terms with the death of their parents, who passed away only days apart. Charlie has been trying to make it as a writer in Hollywood and has had modest success with a B-movie script, while Dave is the “successful” son, an affluent attorney who stayed near his parents in Boston but who harbors resentment against Charlie’s abandonment. “Beyond Any Blessing,” the final story in the collection, and one of the best, introduces us to Daniel, whose parents died when he was seven and who was raised by his elderly grandfather, a rabbi. Now, at the age of 90, his grandfather has been let go due to infidelity, and Daniel tries both to help him and to come to terms with his own restless and unintelligible life.
Nadler is a writer’s writer, a fine observer of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of character.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-12647-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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