A poet's playful prose miscellany. Heyen (Crazy Horse in Stillness, etc.; English/State Univ. of New York, Brockport) is a contemporary Whitmanian, inclined to look for rapture in the mysteries of hogs, grubs, sycamores, and silver maples. As with Walt Whitman, too, Heyen's sense of humor helps to form what he sees: ``Not one grub is a bishop, mullah, or rabbi, so far as we know. . . . Not one is a rock star,'' he observes. But his sense of the droll is more wry and less loving than Whitman's. As someone who is living in a time of ecological decline (one of Heyen's preferred subjects, along with poetry), perhaps he can't afford to be expansively affirmative. His monologues, essays, diatribes, tales, and asides are at their best when he has chosen a very specific subject and has adopted a singular means of approach to it. One of the most striking and effective pieces, ``Tongues,'' leads Heyen to gather a swirling catalogue of facts and questions (Ö la Whitman) about the origins of tongue, the once popular meat derived from buffalo, whose population is now greatly diminished. Though succinct, the essay builds an uncanny momentum based on the drama of the writer's curiosity about the topic. We come to believe in his ecstatic respect for nature; in his conditional affection for human whims and his criticism of human error; and in his rage at unnecessary destruction of animal beauty. To mingle such different perspectives convincingly is no small success. But elsewhere, Heyen too often engages trivially with the trivial in arch and noncommittal prose mementos. His shrewd and delicate touch seems easily distracted, with the result that the range here is uneven. Still, how can one complain in good faith about a writer who would dub his first purchase of an ``Elvis on Velvet'' artwork with the moniker ``Synonym in Gauche''?
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1998
ISBN: 1-880238-56-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: BOA Editions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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