The latest in this 85-year-old series continues the tradition of putting the timely and new into a kind of yearbook of the American literary scene, this time with Tan (The Hundred Secret Senses, 1995, etc.) picking the sides and calling the shots. “The best stories do change us,” writes Tan. “They help us live interesting lives.” That’s a pretty tall order, especially nowadays, when literary fiction in general and the short story in particular become increasingly self-referential and esoteric. But there’s still some life to be found on these pages. Rick Bass, in “The Hermit’s Story,” takes us into Jack London territory with an old-fashioned campfire yarn about a dog trainer and her frozen passage through the snows of Canada with her sledding team. At the other extreme (in “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars—), Junot Diaz heads from New Jersey to Santo Domingo, where Dominican narrator Yunior takes his Nuyorican girlfriend Magdalena on a doomed holiday in the hope of patching up their shaky relationship. The best stories here, in fact, all tend to be regional: Ha Jin portrays the metaphoric claustrophobia of a Communist boarding school (—In the Kindergarten—), while A. Hemon’s family portrait (—Islands—) offers a microcosmic study of the survivors of Stalin’s gulags. Domestic life American-style doesn—t seem to have the same resonance: Heidi Julavits’s deconstruction of a wedding album (—Marry the One Who Gets There First—) is too clever by half, whereas Lorrie Moore’s “Real Estate” does nothing very original with the tired theme of the malcontent woman looking for her dream house. Similarly, Stephen Dobyns’s interior fantasy “Kansas” (the hero reimagines the story’s end over and over) becomes quickly tedious, while Tim Gatreaux’s more straightforward account of loneliness redeemed through art (—The Piano Tuner—) succeeds with less commotion. Perhaps less is more, after all: the more ambitious pieces here disappoint almost without exception, whereas the authors who are old-fashioned enough to want to tell a story usually manage to do just that—and quite nicely, too.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-92683-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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