Beattie (Walks with Men, 2010, etc.) sometimes stumbles, but her mordant and frequently comic depictions of ways in which we...
A generous gathering of 48 stories first published in the eponymous weekly often defined by Beattie’s trademark understatements, ellipses and—let’s admit it—occasionally clichéd situations and plots.
Not all her best stories (e.g., “Jacklighting,” “Windy Day at the Reservoir,” “Park City”) share this lineage. But this big volume includes numerous seminal and influential portrayals of sensitive, self-absorbed young urban professionals succumbing to passivity and indifference, and eventually growing up and into a fuller engagement with the larger world’s claims on their rudimentary attention spans. Fashionable angst and forced eccentricity sometimes blur focus and blunt force in stories that feel insubstantial—a woman’s resentment of her husband’s supposed infidelities in “Downhill”; a defrocked fashion model’s yearning to reconstruct her unhappy life in “Colorado”; and an unattractive woman’s history of failed relationships in “Wolf Dreams.” Yet when Beattie eludes the entrapments of quotidian cliché, she commands a crisp, understated prose style and a talent for manipulating viewpoints into new ways of observing done-to-death conflicts. In “Snakes’ Shoes,” the breakup of a storybook marriage is felt most keenly by a sorrowful, silent brother-in-law. “Fancy Flights” looks at broken relationships through several variously sympathetic eyes—including those of a family dog. Elsewhere, Beattie displays increasingly more complex understanding of the varieties of awakened regrets and aroused fears of the looming presences of age and enfeeblement. In “Janus,” a gift from a former lover stimulates a complex meditation on the enduring, shaping power of the past; and “The Burning House” flawlessly dramatizes the moral awakening of a shallow woman doomed to understand that her closest friends are virtual strangers to her.
Beattie (Walks with Men, 2010, etc.) sometimes stumbles, but her mordant and frequently comic depictions of ways in which we persevere, screw up and usually survive our own foolishness give her better stories genuine power, and make them well worth returning to.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6874-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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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