Varallo has a striking talent for drawing realistic characters, especially young people, and dropping them into situations...
Iowa Short Fiction Award winner Varallo (Out Loud, 2008, etc.) offers a third collection of short literary fiction.
Young, disaffected Mira moves from one job, one relationship, to another in the allegorical "Some Other Life," believing there’s some truth in the life of a reclusive child. "Time Apart Together" explores the ennui of a college dropout and lackadaisical garage band drummer. The young man shills for a soon-to-collapse credit company and attempts to shed Ursula, a girl obsessed with being wanted. Varallo moves the setting to high schools in "Everybody Knew," "Slow Car" and "Tragic Little Me." The first of the trio offers an unusual premise—a student confirms his self-absorption when he unwittingly puts on a class comedy skit the day after a fellow student dies. "Tragic Little Me" introduces Leaf, introverted and intellectually incurious but with a gift for art. Leaf appears again in the penultimate story, "Lucky Us," sharing an unsettled home with her mother and grandmother. That story crackles with an unexpected, electrifying moment as the grandmother is confronted by a mugger. As the young thug attempts to steal her takeout meal, she bites him, and "he screamed out in pain" and then "looked at Miriam as if she were someone who contained surprising depths. Someone worthy, even, of his worthless respect. He winked at her." The remaining stories, "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," "After the Finale," "No One at All" and the titular story feature in turn a supercilious writing student, a befuddled grandfather, a lonely young boy and a jobless father. Each of them, as with every other piece, unfolds with a sense of alienation, of children struggling to cope in a complex world and adults confused by circumstance.
Varallo has a striking talent for drawing realistic characters, especially young people, and dropping them into situations where resolutions are hard-earned and not always satisfying.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8101-5240-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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