Sometimes heavy-handed, always heavy-hearted.
Novelist Daugherty (The Boy Orator, 1999, etc.) returns with a collection of eight stories about mostly unhappy denizens of “Mama Houston.”
In “Comfort Me With Apples,” a folklorist named George, whose wife and parents have died in a freak traffic accident, becomes entwined in a family of illegal immigrants until the mother snaps and drowns her children. In “Tombstone Television,” George reappears to befriend a homeless man living at the cemetery where George has buried his family. In both stories, as in much of the collection, a middle-class white man confronts his own unhappiness while observing the authentically down-and-out. The narrator of “A Worried Song After Work” is a labor lawyer on a blind date with a perky blond. When he drags her along to a meeting of disgruntled workers, he assumes that she is too materialistic to appreciate the issues he cares about, but she, like most of Daugherty’s women, turns out to be a tough cookie. Romance blossoms even as hope for improving the workers’ condition fades. Even in stories that do not directly concern Houston’s underclass, the city comes across as a corrupt and depressing place peopled by Daugherty’s lonely, vaguely ineffective protagonists. Henry, of “Henry’s Women,” is dumped by his girlfriend because he doesn’t notice she’s had an abortion only to fall in love with a pregnant woman whose husband has left her. In “The Leavings of Panic,” the narrator recalls his mother’s impatience with his father’s passivity as he contemplates stealing a good friend’s wife. While the protagonist of “Bliss” appears on his way to artistic success away from Houston, the story is set in the murky zone of regret in the weeks of packing up before he leaves town—and his wife and child. In the final piece, “Burying the Blues,” Hugh, a junior-college history professor obsessed with black blues, gradually recognizes that truly knowing another culture, or even another individual, is impossible.
Sometimes heavy-handed, always heavy-hearted.Pub Date: July 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-87074-469-0
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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