The style and originality lacking in these 12 commonplace stories is almost made up for in sincerity. Ardizzone cares about the moral and social dimensions of growing up in ethnic Chicago during the '50s and '60s, even if he articulates his passion in leaden prose. Attentive to detail and atmosphere, the author seldom ventures here from home turf. The story ``Baseball Fever,'' in fact, seems to be an earlier version of Ardizzone's novel Heart of the Order (1986), complete with the deadly line drive by Danny Bacigalupo into the Adam's apple of Mickey Meenan. Chicago's north side is the setting for many of these humorless tales—like ``Nonna,'' about an aged immigrant woman who wanders the old neighborhood, unfamiliar with the new smells and sounds. Most of the pieces, though, concern a child's point of view, as with the young altar boy of ``The Eyes of the Children'' who wants to believe that the bleeding man seen in church was Christ; or another boy, in ``The Language of the Dead,'' who, falsely accused of starting a fight, freaks out when a Christian Brother smacks him around. The long ``Holy Cards'' also relies on that old favorite—the horrors of literally believing the Baltimore Catechism, which the protagonist subverts by developing a martyrology of the Chicago Cubs. Tortured sexuality is part of the profile here: In ``Idling,'' the narrator remembers his first girlfriend and his fumbling deflowering; ``Ladie's Choice'' offers the sexual confusions of a self-described greaser; and ``The Daughter and the Tradesman'' gives a Catholic girl's view as she brutally sacrifices her virginity. Warm memories of an ethnic mom surface on the occasion of her hospitalization in ``My Mother's Stories''; a father and son silently bond in ``Ritual,'' a fishing- trip tale; and a light note is managed in ``World Without End'' when a son escapes his overbearing parents by moving away, even though their visits revive all the conflicts. Nostalgic narratives with no frills.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-252-06483-6
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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