The latest Flannery O'Connor Award winner offers a first volume of 11 stories (most originally published in literary reviews) featuring odd young women and men dealing with loss, failed relationships, and the difficulties of adulthood. Brenner's female slackers don't cultivate their eccentricities; they're just ill at ease in the ordinary world and often find themselves attracted to men of dubious charms. The narrator of ``Round Bar,'' a lover of men and animals, follows her married boyfriend from a bar in Florida where he performs back to his native Nashville, where she waits in a hotel to spend fugitive moments with him. The young woman of ``A Little Something'' falls for an older man with a really good line, one smoothly suggesting a sense of the miraculous. The narrator of ``Easy'' finally bails out of a relation with a violent bully. Lack of ambition plagues Brenner's twentysomething young women: The typist in ``Undisclosed Location'' feels extra-worthless when the fat slob down the hall scores big in the state lottery. A drab secretary in ``Guest Speaker'' invents a new self to present to a visiting speaker whom she must chauffeur from the airport. And in ``I Am the Bear,'' a young woman who hands out ice cream samples in a supermarket while wearing a bear costume loses her job by offending a local celebrity. Brenner's hapless protagonists struggle against their own fears—of wildness, of passion, of danger, and of recklessness. The men in these tales are equally awkward and uncertain: The grad student in ``The Oysters,'' working on a project in Agricultural Science, is frustrated in his love for his married prof and begins to feel like the oysters he's studying. The college-educated waiter in ``The Reverse Phone Book'' experiences so deep a ``chronic unease with the normal pace and pitch of the world'' that people assume he's retarded. Quirky, challenging tales and an impressive debut.
Pub Date: May 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-8203-1794-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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
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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