Redel writes with wit and with a great understanding of the vagaries of adult relationships.
Eleven stories of love, loss and relationships gone awry.
Redel starts with one of her strongest stories, “You Look Like You Do,” in which a married couple, Antonio and Marley, fantasizes about including divorcee Sabina in their bed. When they share this fantasy with Sabina, she’s in equal measure intrigued and put off. Instead, she has a one-night stand with dance instructor Tomaso before seductively helping Marley with a family crisis. In “Stuff,” a man sorts through his late mother’s belongings with his girlfriend, trying to decide what’s to be tossed and what’s a necessary reminder of his mother’s existence. He comes across a well-creased (and obviously well-read) letter addressed to “Dear Full-Figured Lady” and signed by a man who was obviously interested in kindling a romance with her two years before she died. “The Third Cycle” introduces us to Polly and Susie, though these are personae created by two women having lunch and flirting with the young waiter. At the table next to them is the “Blue Woman,” who’s having trouble trying to both eat and take care of her baby at the same time, so Polly and Susie take the baby from her in what seems an act of kindness. “Ahoy,” the final story in the collection, is both the longest and the best of Redel’s work here. The story self-consciously and brilliantly echoes John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman when Olivia and her husband move to an island. She becomes pregnant but imagines the father to be Capt. Hardwick, a romantic 19th-century sea captain, rather than her egregious, drug-addled husband.
Redel writes with wit and with a great understanding of the vagaries of adult relationships.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-935536-37-6
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Four Way
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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