M*A*S*H, with lots more sex and cursing.
Debut assortment of Vietnam pieces, from a nurse who was there, that wants to be a true story collection, but the madcap anecdotes flush with familiar tropes fail to either stand alone or cohere.
A cast of hospital personnel stumbles through the alternate craziness and boredom of life just behind the front lines, all the while struggling to calculate the meaning of the war. In “Butch,” a young Specialist tries to adopt an even younger Vietnamese boy to give himself a clear wartime identity. In “Psychic Hand,” a short-timer nurse palm-reads for a Vietnamese girl whose lifeline has a dot at the end: they’re both about to check out, so to speak. Most often, it’s O’Neill herself who gets in the way of these pieces. In “One Positive Thing,” a pregnant nurse contemplating abortion participates in surgery on another pregnant woman who’s been shot—the scene has the potential to rivet, but the payoff for the character is simply sentimental, where O’Neill could naturally have been colder and more damaged. In “Monkey on Our Backs,” a nurse puts out a contract on a small primate that almost stands for all that is ancient and sacred about Vietnam (the actual Vietnamese characters are little more than cliché furniture), and while the story threatens to become allegory, O’Neill cuts it off before it comes to mean anything. There are nice moments—an M-16 as heavy as a corpse, a nurse who finds a blown-up snapshot of herself hung on a wall as a pinup, the intensity of a moment when an anesthetist decides not to medicate a patient undergoing surgery—but they are random and infrequent. The high-jinks that follow the spiking of a barbecue’s steak sauce in “Drugs” perhaps comes closest to capturing the absurdity of war, but the horror of it is almost absent here, and many of these stories may just as well have come from day camp.
M*A*S*H, with lots more sex and cursing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-44608-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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