McNally's first collection of 14 stories, winner of this year's Flannery O'Connor Award, leisurely patches together instances from the lives of two interrelated families and their small circle of friends who have been touched by an accidental death and by a great deal of drifting and aimlessness. Many of the stories, told by one character or another in brief snapshots, are so shapeless as to be almost incoherent; but when McNally's method is working, the reader becomes intimately acquainted with members of the McClenahan family, including Orion, a photojournalist who dreams of flying to Central America and making a difference; and of the Jowalski family, including Helen, who lost her brother Peter in a freak accident when he was electrocuted on a railroad track. McNally's modus operandi is the slice-of-life; often he juxtaposes one instance to flashbacks from another time. This method is most effective in ``Gun Law At Vermilion,'' in which Anna—once Orion's lover—visits her dying father; the piece movingly juxtaposes real life and the pulp westerns that Anna reads to her father and that dramatize her father's disappointment in her. Other tales (``The Anonymity of Flight''—Helen joins her ex-lover in Vermont for a weekend; ``Peru''—Orion intersperses Central America reminiscence with barroom conversation and crash-pad disorientation; and ``Breathing Is Key''—self-destructive Sarah, obsessed with the gasoline her mother once drank, stays with her abusive boyfriend) surprise with invention but fail finally to cohere, mirroring the plight of the characters: ``Lightning, gravity, love—I've never properly understood any of it.'' ``I'm not something from a myth!'' Helen says, and McNally insistently chops up his narratives—occasionally achieving aesthetic success—to make them reflect human uncertainty in the face of life's surprises.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8203-1378-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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