Strong if uneven: the emerging voice of a new talent to watch.
Twelve despairing stories set in a sun-bleached—and bleached-out—Southwest.
In the title piece, young Leigh’s friendship with the pathetic new kid on the block culminates when they expose themselves to the neighborhood pervert, but the story’s real power derives from claustrophobic working-class world Leigh resides in. In “Trapeze,” a slightly older girl, Karen—like Leigh, Catholic and from a big family—is tormented by her gymnastics partner. Karen survives, even prospers, but also hardens in a heartbreaking way. Willa, another tragic survivor, wins a Pyrrhic victory of wills and love against her widower father in “The Shiprock Fair.” Unlike most of the tales, “Blue Fly” is set at the turn of the last century and has a boy at its center, orphan Madison Evers, whose poignant longing for love focuses on his brother’s wife. As the protagonists grow up, the stories become bleaker, many mere snapshots of hopelessness. So the pieceworker of “Where I Work” and the young girl about to go off with a stranger in “Dr. War is a Voice on the Phone” are victims without a chance. “Crazy Yellow” returns to the world of children, but eight-year-old Pete, who lies to his sick mother and ends up alone in the house with yet another of Cummins’s ominous strangers, lacks the survival instincts of Karen or Willa. The richest stories reach beyond victimhood into more complex emotional territory. In “Headhunter,” a young woman on her way to visit her idolized father ends up in a fatal confrontation with another motorist and walks away thinking more about her father than the dead man. In “Bitterwater,” the self-awareness of the narrator’s Navaho husband, who abandons her and ends up in a detox center, is an oddly reassuring surprise. The other piece about marriage, “Starburst,” plumbs the twisted loyalties and understandings between spouses as a policeman who suspects his wife of theft finds himself aroused by her recklessness.
Strong if uneven: the emerging voice of a new talent to watch.Pub Date: April 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-26925-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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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