Gorgeous, illuminating, entrancing fiction.
The scientific themes that made Barrett’s novel The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998) and her NBA–winning collection Ship Fever (1996) two of the most unusual literary successes of their decade again predominate in this superb new gathering of four stories and two novellas.
Two are roughly contemporary. In “The Mysteries of Ubiquitur,” a girl who grows up in an ardent, articulate family “packed with scientists” spends her life in the comforting, smothering shadow of the older man who had encouraged her childish curiosity. And in “The Forest,” an elderly biochemist seduces a vibrant young woman into a complex visit to his past. The inchoate, unclassifiable nature of human emotions is studied in “Theories of Rain” (and famed naturalist William Bartram makes an appearance), while the problem of reconciling science with religion and the conjoining of two separate lives are examined in “Two Rivers,” a searchingly ambitious story that could have been even more elaborately developed. Barrett is at her best in the longer tales. The title novella is about a cartographer who, after being posted to India’s Himalayan range, becomes obsessed with the region’s harsh splendor and exiles himself from his homeland and marriage. And “The Cure” (with its slight echoes of the earlier “Ship Fever”) is a brilliant story of several generations’ ordeals (in Ireland, the North Atlantic, and the Adirondacks) relative to the mingled beauty and fury of the natural world and the futility and necessity of human efforts to control and comprehend it. There are many connections, genealogical and otherwise, among these six tales and the content of its two immediate predecessors. One understands how the intricacies of the complex phenomena Barrett has studied have possessed her imagination: she’s still filling in gaps, revisiting scenes, reworking materials.
Gorgeous, illuminating, entrancing fiction.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-04348-7
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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