Strong work from a new voice still seeking a personal purchase.
Sadness and dread predominate in a wise debut collection of men on the search for meaning amid various incarnations of solitude. The author’s short fiction has also appeared in, among other places, Best New American Voices 2001.
Place battles identity throughout: trouble brews in the near-novella “Winter Island” when narrator Gabe sees a pig flying over the New England valley he has adopted as his home—and then things get more interesting when other people start seeing the pig too and plagues begin descending on the immaculate land. The ability of disease and pain to botch even the most perfect forms of happiness and love is a common theme: in “Near to Gone,” one man at an emotional crossroads looks for knowledge from another whose job is to watch an exposed power line; in “They Have Numbered All My Bones,” the hackneyed premise of a man remembering love while undergoing surgery is surprisingly effective at generating non-hackneyed romance; in “Darkening of the World,” a quasi-mystical pooch comes to extract human love more efficiently than either child or spouse; and in “Blood Knot,” fly-fishing is once again employed as a metaphor for everything. Westmoreland’s men are almost always crude and primitive, often terminally ill, but conveniently well-read. Animals—livestock, dogs, fish—frequently bear their pain. Occasionally, the tone slips into something more like journal-writing, but the odd transcendent moment may be worth it. There are some familiar young writer’s mistakes: an excess of loyalty to models like Hemingway, and plot twists where mood could carry us through. Still, between the lines is a complete vision of a world broken by displacement and bad luck, a sadness that is never so perfect as when 20 cows are executed for dehydration just before a rain-bringing storm.
Strong work from a new voice still seeking a personal purchase.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100852-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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
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