Evocative stories with a potent kick.
Lewis’s second collection (after In the Arms of Our Elders, 1995) ranges in setting from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Denver, showing him a storyteller with a superb sense of place.
“Shades,” about a boy who catches his first glimpse of his father at 14 on the streets of his Tennessee hometown, is remarkable equally for its portrait of the boy’s mother as for his sketch of the man who left the morning the boy was conceived. “Kudzu,” about a chilly encounter with a once earthy lover, and “In the Swamp,” about a man who takes his fiancée back to his hometown for the funeral of a man who briefly filled the role of a father in his life, are also Tennessee-set, using the land as an effective backdrop to a young man’s growth. “For the Brothers Who Ain’t Here” is named for the libation someone always poured on the sidewalk when beers were opened on the stoop in Bed-Stuy—for those “shot over two six packs,” “up at Attica for ten,” or “left for college and never came back.” The piece is about a deception that leads to an innocent man getting fiercely beaten, even though “Nothing was supposed to happen.” The title story is a masterpiece of nuance, combining a sexually charged narrative with a meditation on historic lynchings. Clive, a history professor, picks up a flirtatious white woman at a bar in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and agrees to drive her to Staunton, where he’s headed to visit his revered but ailing uncle Izelle. Observing the attention paid to his new “friend” by a group of white men at a gas station, Clive lingers at the Coke machine, “thinking of Bayard Rustin, snuck out of Montgomery in the trunk of a car.” As the trip continues, he thinks back to tales he’s heard from Izelle over the years, including what happened to the Scottsboro boys when “a White girl was in the mix.”
Evocative stories with a potent kick.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-053665-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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