Kinsella seems to be living off the capital of Shoeless Joe (1982) in this collection of sketches and one-trick ponies—more throwaways than fictions—about the bush leagues. In the title story, basically a footnote to the movie Field of Dreams (which was based on Shoeless Joe), Mike Houle, a promising ballplayer who chokes in the clutch, is sent by his agent to Iowa, where he is supposed to work his way back to the big time by playing for a small-town team. He soon discovers that the team plays intrasquad baseball exclusively; it's simply an excuse to recruit eligible bachelors. Houle doesn't complain, however; while staying with a local family, he's fallen in love with the girl intended for him. The piece is clever, cute, and sentimental, and the same might be said for most of this collection. In ``Searching for January'' Roberto Clemente, killed years ago in a plane crash, returns from the dead in search of January 1973, when time stopped for him. ``The Fadeaway'' shows Christy Mathewson (also returning from the Great Beyond) teaching a manager about his fadeaway pitch. In ``The Baseball Wolf'' a player becomes a werewolf and convinces the narrator to turn into an owl with a taste for kangaroo rats. ``The Darkness Deep Inside'' at least has a satirical spin with a little bite: A player who's born again loses his competitive zest and becomes, by virtue of his peaceful demeanor, a ``disruptive force'' on the team. Neither as surprising or comic as T. Coraghessan Boyle, nor as wry and smirky as Bruce Jay Friedman, Kinsella settles for corn pone and tepid standup routines here, instead of teasing magic from ordinary lives as he does in his best work. Minor-league material.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017188-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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