Heartache, loneliness, and abundant booze (hence the title) shape the lives of the four San Franciscan women in this debut collection, winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction. The volume, sectioned off into tales about Jane, Magdalena, Zoe, and Victoria, isolates the source of despair in each woman’s life and extrapolates from it small scenarios that offer character portraits. In the opening story, “Kilter,” Jane mourns the death of Lars, her lover, decapitated in a car accident a few years ago. She weeps on his grave, goes on drinking binges, and attempts communication with her grown-up daughter. In the next Jane story, a —Guest— comes to visit her—-a man she met at an airport. She hesitantly takes him to bed, though the memory of Lars still lies between them. In “Blood Bank,” the first of the Magda stories, Magda faces a hysterectomy and the success of the husband who has left her. Zoe, too, is going through a divorce, and deals with the pain by using chemical peels as her therapy, shucking the outward married woman to reveal the emptiness she feels herself to be without her husband. In later Zoe stories, Zoe struggles both with her daily work routine as a graphic artist and with bouts of heavy drinking. The last eight pieces focus on Victoria, who starts out happily married to Peter. Soon enough, however, he begins a life of persistent flirtation (and drinking). In “Endings,” Victoria and Philip, an alcoholic, depressive magician, enjoy a true love affair, discovered by Peter, who in the previous story has already realized his role as cuckold. In ensuing tales, Victoria and Peter separate, Philip goes to jail, she begins an affair with her psychiatrist and is eventually left to sleep alone, as are the rest of Graham’s women. Men leaving, women drinking, and repetitive plots leave the collection, although well written, also redundant and limited in impact.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55849-167-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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