Another tour de force from a writer whose voice and perspective mark her as one of the cherishable talents of our era.
The Man Booker Prize–winning Irish writer’s new work (The Gathering, 2007, etc.) is a beguiling collection of 31 short stories.
Love—of partners, children, friends, siblings, the afflicted—is the hallmark of this group of rich, often short vignettes. Fury, tenderness, incomprehension and impulse illuminate scenes of modern life (work life, family life or a solitary life), highlighting the gulf and yearning stretching between men and women as they deal with attraction, procreation, money and mortality. The title story tidily encompasses the emotional range (and rage) of a couple managing a family visit with their newborn child, and similar fast-moving squalls of behavior mark others, like “Caravan,” in which a wife and mother struggles to cope with her kids and husband simultaneously. “Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar” is a heartbreaking description of compassion extended toward a mentally disturbed friend, one of many tales of sex and friendship, lust and separate destinies. Contemporary Ireland is generally the setting although there are rare departures, as in “Here’s to Love,” a story of lost histories shadowing the present when friends meet in Paris, one of whom is now married to an older man, a survivor of Vietnam who still flinches at the barking of a dog. Eloquent images light up these overlapping stories like flares—a line of tulips flattened by the wind; a swarm of bees on a gatepost; a dusting of flour on a carpet. And, as always with Enright, there is mesmerizing language that can switch from comic to lyric in a blink. Voiced predominantly by female narrators, these stories spill over with warmth, wisdom, earthiness and an exceptional vision.
Another tour de force from a writer whose voice and perspective mark her as one of the cherishable talents of our era.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1874-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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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