Beattie strikes more nerves than a ham-fisted dental technician. Exceptionally interesting work.
People whom trouble always seems to find and introspective victims of fractured relationships are the featured players in Beattie’s strong seventh collection—published in the immediate wake of the Pen/Bernard Malamud Prize awarded to her this month.
Oddly, though, the strongest impression made by these 11 consummately wrought tales is their essential similarity to the wide-ranging, dialogue-crammed stories of John O’Hara’s later years. Beattie knows the suburban, artsy-craftsy, vaguely politically liberal, emotionally booby-trapped milieux her articulate characters inhabit as well as anyone now writing. She’s a master at presenting affectless characters who take on credibility and interest from their social and familial contexts—like the sheepish, well-meaning male protagonists of “Hurricane Carleyville” and (the superb) “In Irons,” both men who can’t stay with the women they fascinate and eventually disappoint, or the infertile wife of “Coydog,” who learns during a holiday family reunion (a situation Beattie employs repeatedly) all the secrets held by her elusive husband’s kin, despite their ritual assurances “that things almost always turned out for the best.” Melodramatic plot elements are also common factors. “The Big-Breasted Pilgrim,” a savvy study of a celebrated chef and his male assistant anticipating a presidential visit, climaxes with an incident that deftly reverses the story’s wry comic tone. “The Women of This World” finds a shocking, well-placed metaphor for its compact presentation of women victimized by emotionally distant men. Elsewhere, vivid glimpses of incompatibility, infidelity, and separation are unerringly juxtaposed against seemingly neutral images of contemporary faddishness and pretension (“We went to a party, . . . Gianni Versace was there, but he was peeing the whole time”). There are a few misfires (notably, “Cat People” and “See the Pyramids”), but most of these pieces dig deeper, and resonate more powerfully, than even Beattie’s most celebrated earlier fiction—and the title story, another ingenious portrayal of a bizarre extended family, may be the best she has yet written.
Beattie strikes more nerves than a ham-fisted dental technician. Exceptionally interesting work.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1169-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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