A talented newcomer who, one hopes, next time out will reveal more clearly the secrets she’s kept to herself in these...
A debut collection of 13 stories that explores with authority the internal landscape of girls and women struggling for redemption.
Colored by the Catholic experience, the females in these pieces suffer from emotions that the nuns, despite their fervor for obedience and order, have failed to suppress. Death and sex, disappointment and disability abound. Sometimes the terror is real, as in “In Houses,” where the narrator’s face is slashed (“I have had a new face for three months now, three months since my old one was cut”), and “Nice Girl,” where the accidental drowning of an eight-year-old haunts her younger sister’s life (“My mother says I screamed . . . I lay on the edge of the pool screaming down into the water at my sister for our mother who became, that day, my mother”). But more often, that terror is as subtle as a teenaged girl contemplating her attractiveness (“Quiet”) or an abandoned woman waiting for a visit from her young son (“Here in the World”). Lancelotta, who’s published in the Threepenny Review and Glimmer Train, among other places, sets up interesting and out-of-the-box situations: a blind man taken home as a lover from a bus stop in “The Guide,” and a girl who is moved by her immigrant grandmother’s story of being molested by an uncle in “The Gift.” The pervading sense of distance and estrangement between couples, family members, and neighbors is palpable throughout the collection, with the strongest entries being those told in the first-person by nameless narrators who bare their souls in taut muscular prose. But while Lancelotta’s voice is powerful, it is also self-conscious, and the reach for literary expression more often than not obscures the tale .
A talented newcomer who, one hopes, next time out will reveal more clearly the secrets she’s kept to herself in these poetically written but ultimately aimless stories.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-099-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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