Valuable for devotees, perhaps, but not the best introduction to Warner’s work.
Fans of the late Warner’s schoolmarmish tales about upper-middle-class English country life will undoubtedly relish this slim volume of previously uncollected stories (1926–77), all but one published stateside in The New Yorker.
Populated with the eccentric figures Warner favored—strong-willed spinsters suspicious of modernity, precocious child-aesthetes, mild-mannered shopkeepers—most of these stories would be more accurately described as vignettes or character sketches. In lieu of a traditional narrative arc, the frequently sentimental pieces describe situations or flights of fancy or the characters’ momentary feelings. “A Brief Ownership” is fairly typical: its unnamed narrator, planning a drive through Scotland, finds a listing for a town named Dull in her guidebook and imagines herself retiring there, occupying her days by reading about the lives of English bishops. The most successful tales concern a neurotic antiques dealer, Mr. Edom, and the intricacies of his dealings with customers and difficult employees. In “English Mosaic,” a client brings Mr. Edom a drainpipe, hideously plastered with broken bits of valuable china. While his arrogant assistant proclaims the thing’s beauty, Mr. Edom feels almost personally insulted by the mind that could create such an ugly object. “Qwertyuiop,” one of the more engaging entries here, features a sulky teenaged narrator (a refreshing change from Warner’s generally fusty protagonists) who longs for a typewriter in order to transcribe her poems. The stories are framed by an informative though surprisingly uninspired introduction by the late William Maxwell, Warner’s editor at the New Yorker, and a superfluous afterword (a string of plot synopses) by Michael Steinman, who edited this volume and The Elements of Lavishness (p. 1669), a simultaneously published collection of the correspondence between Warner and Maxwell.
Valuable for devotees, perhaps, but not the best introduction to Warner’s work.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2001
ISBN: 1-58243-112-4
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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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