Errors aside, an insightful and reflective short-story collection that examines the high and lows of life.
A series of tautly crafted, introspective short stories that get to the heart of personal struggle (divorce, addiction, romance), one character at a time.
The first story in the collection, “The New & Improved Lost Generation,” begins with two characters who “met at a well-known rehab center in L.A.” and “got to know each other in group.” This tale, which recounts the dissolution of Harry and Jenny’s romance, sets the tone for the rest of the book. Nethercott’s stories resemble mini-autobiographies–bits and pieces of everyday people’s lives. The element separating these characters from laypeople, however, is the way they live without boundaries or conventional limitations. In story after story, the characters seem to have lost their way. Hopkins is a retired boxer who scrapes together enough money to eat and keep a roof over his head by busing tables at dingy restaurants and noisy cafeterias. When the nameless narrator of this particular tale, a writer trying to find his way, befriends Hopkins, the author reveals that the two men will change each others’ lives forever. After a few days of crossing paths at Clifton’s, a downtown cafeteria, the storyteller comments about Hopkins, “I’d see him once in a while, sometimes to get a drink, and sometimes I ran into him late at night at Clifton’s. I guess we were friends in a way.” Chance meetings are a common thread in these 13 short stories–these interactions leave the characters changed. For the most part, Nethercott’s writing is tight and fluid. However, as well-paced as these unorthodox stories are, there are moments of unrealistic, expositional awkwardness: “This isn’t a story, really it’s a portrait. It’s a snapshot of what my life was like at that time. I never knew what would happen next, who would wander into my life, and who would wander out.” These rhythmless jolts interrupt the flow instead of enlightening the reader. The other blemish to these otherwise well-crafted short stories are the many typos, which increase in number toward the book’s closing.
Errors aside, an insightful and reflective short-story collection that examines the high and lows of life.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4196-8227-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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