A stylistically unremarkable collection offering paltry literary nourishment.
Characters uneasy in their skin make up Brenner’s intriguingly titled but ultimately undeveloped second collection (after the Flannery O’Connor Award winner Large Animals in Everyday Life , 1996).
Inexplicable phenomena in ordinary life prove Brenner’s fascination here, as evidenced by the hobby of the protagonist of the leading story, “The Anomalist,” who methodically collects and publishes accounts of curious happenings ignored by science. As he conscientiously records evidence of stone-swallowing by seals and spontaneous detonations, the Anomalist recognizes that people who look too closely at one object are not seeing other, important objects—in his case, his obsession for listing has kept him from taking sincere notice of his attractive new single-mom assistant, Maggie. In another story, “The Human Side of Instrumental Transcommunication” (originally published in Story), the first-person narrator speaks in the broad, reassuring tones of a public speaker at an annual convention who, bit by bit, reveals the haunting story of the untimely death of his own young son, Nathan, obsessed by “little machines.” “Four Squirrels,” inspired by a newspaper account of rodents entangled by a plastic grocery bag, relates the struggle for freedom in the words of the four sibling animals, as well as the motivations of their savior veterinarian. In these ten ill-assorted pieces, Brenner’s insistence on making connections between the rational and the far-out occasionally veer into obscurity, as in “Are We Almost There,” in which the “I” searches from childhood to young adulthood for a certain “You” who remains teasingly unnamed: Is it the sea? Or the Snoopy dog of her early television-watching memory? Despite Brenner’s attempt to imbue her characters with some weight and background (a coworker who unwittingly becomes involved with a crack addict in “Mr. Meek,” for example), the tales feel maddeningly unfinished, coy in their use of TV one-liners, and on the look for a hasty epiphany.
A stylistically unremarkable collection offering paltry literary nourishment.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-245-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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