Uncomfortable moments of adolescent epiphany marked by oblique dialogue, little sense of place and less humor.
Slim collection of uninspiring coming-of-age stories by the winner of University of Iowa’s John Simmons Award for Short Fiction.
Varallo’s narrators desperately want to fit in with their families and social groups, yet don’t quite have that lovable quality. June, the young protagonist of the title story, hopes to be “one of those people who always knew the exact right thing to say at the exact right moment” as she navigates between the animosity of her mother and grandmother. She spends weekends visiting her bewildered, critical grandmother, who steals a pair of swim goggles at the mall partly from a sense of entitlement, partly because her daughter and granddaughter don’t love her. The hyper-observant first-person narrator of “Sometimes I’m Becky Macomber,” whose own family configuration is somehow ruptured, wants so badly to have a happy home life that when she stays overnight with her friend Becky, she tends to smooth the edges in the Macombers’ marital relations. In the epistolary “Be True to Your School,” a young boy writes to a friend who has moved away, jotting impressions of his single mother and his friend Liz in a painful attempt to “fix” himself and control his tendency to always be “angry,” an adolescent euphemism for feeling moved. “Sunday Wash” poignantly shows Jody trying to come to terms with the presence of his mother’s boyfriend Ron after the death of his father. Helping Ron move out boxes of his father’s effects, Jody is annoyed with himself for crying, since now “Ron had seen that part of him that was ugly and embarrassing.”
Uncomfortable moments of adolescent epiphany marked by oblique dialogue, little sense of place and less humor.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87745-951-7
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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