A curiously uneven gathering of four very loosely linked stories. Thomas (An Actual Life, 1996, etc.), who specializes in romantic and familial conflict, has been compared to Anne Tyler, but her knowing portraits of terminally lonely people more closely resemble Dorothy Parker's (albeit with the acid content considerably diluted). She's perfected a crisp, forthright style featuring simple declarative sentences punctuated by summary single words or brief phrases. She has a keen eye for such salient details as ``the hot-hair smell of a little girl'' and the sight of an insomniac househusband eating cornflakes at three a.m., hugging in bed a nightgown abandoned by the wife who has also abandoned him. The latter is the protagonist of ``Walter's Book,'' the strong opening story about a middle-aged New York textbook editor settling unhappily into the knowledge that he'll spend the rest of his life by himself. It's followed by ``Edith's Wardrobe,'' the tale of a fiftyish virgin (the sort of character Estelle Parsons plays to perfection) left on her own after the death of her famous mother. Edith and Walter pass on the street, but never meet. Even more tenuously connected to its companions is ``Bunny's Sister,'' an overwritten and borderline-maudlin piece about a teenage runaway. Better linked, but still inconsequential, is the anecdotal title story, in which Edith helps an adulterous neighbor move the body of her married lover, who's died after a heart attack. The recurring plot elements here (yard sales; outcast children sleeping in cars) suggest that these ``stories'' were perhaps pieces of a novel that wouldn't come together. Whatever. Herb's Pajamas is a disappointing whole that comes to much less than the sum of its parts.
Pub Date: March 31, 1998
ISBN: 1-56512-189-9
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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