In these ten interlinked, chronological stories about Ontario girl Rose, Munro—like Joyce Carol Oates in her early novels—penetrates, with bowsprit knowledge and (unlike Oates) irrepressible tenderness, the iced-in continent of the working-class poor and the erratic course of those who get away. "We sweat for our pretensions," muses Rose, whose 1930s aspirations—toward high school, university—are mocked by stepmother Flo, who pegs out the safety of home, scornful of anyone trying to be other than she was intended to be. But Rose persists, and, after the curiously passive acceptance of her bitterly withdrawn father's approaching death, she seems posessed of a lust, later edged but still imperative, to simply "see what will happen." Anchorless, but learning new roles in an alien culture, she impulsively accepts the marriage proposal of grad-student Patrick, who—in his own minor rebellion against his wealthy family—is infatuated with his image of Rose as the poor, submissive "beggar maid." They will divorce (Rose will later be startled by his hatred), and Rose, now a jill-of-all-trades in radio, will play at domesticity for the brief time her young daughter lives with her. And subsequent loves collapse through missed connections or a too-honest word or two. So Rose is now "adept at disguises." In the last stories Rose returns to her childhood home, to a rapidly deteriorating, savage Flo—and, in a reunion with an old classmate (who's also "resigned to living in bafflement"), she finds understanding. . . and forgiveness. A bountifully compassionate and moving book, some portions of which have appeared in The New Yorker.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1979
ISBN: 0099458357
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
SEEN & HEARD
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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