An impressive debut collection that aptly demonstrates Welch's skill in composing prosaic yet haunting scenarios of love's dark country. Whether describing a retired prostitute coming home to her straitlaced family, or a woman mourning her domineering mother's death while touring royal tombs in Egypt, Welch employs an ominous, flat tone in her narratives—a tone that lends an unsettling quality to seemingly ordinary situations. Many of the nine stories take place in Minnesota, including the strongest piece, ``The Time, the Place, the Loved One.'' The narrator describes her impetuous marriage to the quixotic, creative, and disordered Matthew. Matthew's clinging romanticism, however, moves from the quaint to the absurd, and the narrator eventually concludes that his mental illness is dominating (and destroying) their relationship. The collapse of their love is painful and chilling. A mother-daughter relationship is examined in ``Broken Music.'' Here, Victoria escorts her mother Fania on a sort of pilgrimage to Auschwitz. Fania is the only one on the tour who was actually in a concentration camp. (The others are making the journey to honor relatives.) Everyone in the group regards the tattoo on Fania's arm as a badge of suffering; they want to see her as a tragic figure, but tough and funny Fania won't play to the crowd. They keep asking her how she survived. Finally, Fania confesses to a stunned Victoria that she was a Sonderkommando—she took the bodies from the gas chambers to the ovens. In ``The Oracle,'' Tracy, in the last stages of pregnancy, leaves her husband, who beats her, and stops in Reno on her way back home to the Midwest. She ends up betting her future on the unlikely promise of a blackjack dealer. Like many of the other stories, this one displays the author's splendid sense of balance between love's fictions and life's realities. A fine collection, deserving of attention.
Pub Date: April 30, 1997
ISBN: 1-56689-058-6
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
