Parrish covers a lot of ground—the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s; the wars in Vietnam, Panama, and the Persian Gulf; bigotry, violence,...
A refreshing—at times inspirational—debut collection about hard-working people trying to do the right thing.
Parrish’s Red Stick Men are blue-collar folk living along the lower Mississippi. Their lives are buffeted by high water, high winds, and the ups and downs of the oil industry. (“Red Stick” is a nickname for Baton Rouge, referring to a bloodstained tree used by Indians as a tribal boundary.) “It Pours” is a charming coming-of-age story about a preteen named Jeb, who learns about his father’s strengths and weaknesses as flood waters creep up their street. In “Complicity,” after being warned not to fight with the “confused” boy living next door, he becomes confused himself as the boy’s policeman father beats up his wife and blames it on “a nigra man.” Jeb learns even more about abuse and bigotry when a family of poor Cajuns moves into the neighborhood (“Bonnie Ledet”). In “Hardware Man,” Jeb’s older brother Bob, after a series of failed jobs, is working for seven bucks an hour at Leenks hardware store when an explosion at the nearby refinery brings bitter memories of his mother’s death. In “Exterminator,” Bob, now fighting termites and cockroaches for a living, encounters an old flame who’s been roughed up by her new boyfriend. In “Free Fall,” a welder considers jumping to his death, while in “The Smell of a Car,” a foreman gets involved in the lives of total strangers when he witnesses the shotgun killing of a truck driver. “After the River” is a bizarre, Dali-esque story about Louisiana being washed away by the angry Mississippi.
Parrish covers a lot of ground—the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s; the wars in Vietnam, Panama, and the Persian Gulf; bigotry, violence, and the forces of nature—but at the heart of every story is the very familiar human need for love, respect, and understanding. Fine work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57806-263-2
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
SEEN & HEARD
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 2025 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.
