Fine, able etchings from the heartland.
Debut collection of nine tenderly polished, horsy stories set in Midwestern farm country.
By far the strongest piece here is the title story, delineating an intimate working friendship between Luther, owner of a horse stable, and his nighttime assistant Maurice, an aging, depressed, has-been jockey who is determined to kill himself in the foaling barn. In fact, Maurice feels suicidal at the end of every foaling season, so when he calls in the middle of the night to convey his plans to hang himself, Luther is not surprised. A touching conversation between the two men ensues in the barn; it reveals their youthful hopes, shattered by disappointments, and is fittingly interrupted by the relentless call to new life of a mare giving birth. Previously published in literary journals, these stories convey a strong sense of rootedness reinforced by Richards’s stoic-toned, pared-down language. In “Man Walking,” a young couple buys a large, rugged farm, planning to make it their home for life. Will and his wife, who narrates the tale, originally planned to destroy the old log farmhouse and rebuild it, but she discovers that it’s inhabited by ghosts, “numbers of them, marching back and forth over her head.” Yet the nightly visitation by the solitary man who enters the couple’s room and stands over their bed amazes and reassures the narrator, rather than frightening her. “The Screened Porch” is a lively, witty set piece about a family of sisters named, simply, “second-oldest sister,” “youngest sister” and so on, in the light-dark manner of a Eudora Welty story. With the introduction into the family of one sister’s husband, a man both “marvelously strange” and familiar to them, the others have to make room on the sofa—a change that will alter their relationships irreparably.
Fine, able etchings from the heartland.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-932511-33-4
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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