A long time coming for the first collection of short fiction from a well-established source.
Broughton (Hob’s Daughter, 1984, etc.) returns with a broad range of tales in a variety of styles and emotional landscapes reflecting his vast experience and travel.
Often a simple premise gets things going here, quickly expanding into stories that tell entire histories. In “Ashes,” a death in the family will be a young man’s last nudge toward adulthood, leading him to realize that “the cabin and landscape, in exchange for his pledge of leaving, were giving up secrets to him that he had forgotten.” A woman, in “The Classicist,” stuck with her widowed Greek-scholar father, contemplates both her final youthful indulgences and the pregnancy that has resulted from them. “The Terrorist” heads into dangerous territory with a literary-genre piece complete with guns and bombs, yet always remaining serious in the manner of Graham Greene’s “entertainments.” A brother bails out his sister at the start of “Living the Revolution,” only to trigger family memories devoid of innocence but able to help them all along in the journey to find themselves. And in “The Wars I Missed,” a man’s history reveals his covetousness of others’ loss in the wake of far-away battles from which he’s excused—a safety that turns out to be not so safe: “I had learned that night that somewhere deep in places I will never reach, far beyond any chance of ultimate healing, there is an unforgiving pain.” These are tales that start small both in subject and emotion but then crescendo, gathering a kind of inertia of the heart, until what they address by the end is vaster than the beginning by many orders of magnitude. One gets the sense both of wisdom and experience brought to bear, joined to a sensitive intellect shaped by years of training in novel writing and poetry.
A long time coming for the first collection of short fiction from a well-established source.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-885635-05-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. Press of Colorado
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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