by Tricia Bauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1995
A well-crafted if lackluster first collection of 14 stories by a capable new writer in the Bobbie Ann Mason/Frederick Barthelme tradition. Dreams, illusions, and the attrition of love are Bauer's principal themes, with many of the pieces narrated in the likable, world-weary voice of a woman in her early 20s. In the elegiac ``Beds,'' the narrator returns home to discover that her parents have moved to separate rooms; in ``Dancing With the Movies,'' dreams of escape from the mundane briefly enliven the citizens of a town that's being used as a film site. And in ``Fortunes,'' a young woman visits a psychic with her mother and her mother's friends, and is overjoyed to learn that she'll ascend above this blue-collar life. A would-be investigative journalist (in ``Pot o' Gold'') infiltrates a suspect game-prize magazine, only to realize that she can't jeopardize the low-paying clerical jobs the women working there desperately need. With gentle irony, Bauer implies that escaping one's class is not necessarily the ticket to a happier life. Elsewhere, she goes beyond implication and irony and draws conclusions for the reader instead. In ``Gypsies,'' as a couple fights caterpillars that have attacked their oak tree, we observe their marriage changing. Bauer doesn't need to add the obvious: ``Joe kissed her again. Wasn't thisjust this unionwhat they really were working so hard for?'' This tendency to sum things up also mars ``Dogs,'' in which a daughter who's left home gives dogs to her father as surrogates for his grown children. She concludes, much in the fashion of popular magazine articles on pet therapy, ``We invested in them all the secrets we could never speak among ourselves.'' Themes and characters, then, that are drawn with empathy, although a tendency toward needless exposition mars the collection.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-882593-11-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
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
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
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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