Still, a rewarding volume that deserves recognition.
A heavily lauded novelist and short-story writer (Family Terrorists, 1994, etc.) proves she’s got staying power with an impressive fourth collection.
The snarky title suggests that some not-so-good situations may be coming up, and in more than a few of the tales, Nelson’s women try to revisit pasts that have disappeared and yet retain a strange resonance over their present lives. In “Incognito,” a girl from Wichita, with her high-school friends, lives a whole life of subterfuge. Easily duping their parents, they rent an apartment, shoplift, even go drinking with the local cops. Years later, the narrator moves back to Wichita and looks for her old gang. In “Palisades,” a young mother leaves her midlife-crisis husband in LA and comes with her baby to the New Mexico town she remembered visiting with her family as a child. There, she befriends a married couple—one a doctor, the other a psychologist—each having an affair unbeknownst to the other. While this setup has all the hallmarks of a poor piece of therapy fiction, Nelson keeps the pathos at bay and clearly delineates the lives and desires of three people trying to dig their way out of unhappy lives, quietly, so as not to upset anyone else. “The Other Daughter” revisits the same Kansas teenage wasteland that’s in “Incognito,” but this time inhabiting the skin of a bored, self-hating adolescent girl condemned to being ignored by her parents and jealous of her glamorous-seeming older sister, who has two boyfriends and does modeling for local stores. There’s a sweaty anger to its pages that gets under your skin in a way that many of Nelson’s stories don’t. Always exquisitely sculpted and unerringly precise, the worst you could say about this collection is that it occasionally holds its characters at a remove.
Still, a rewarding volume that deserves recognition.Pub Date: April 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-1871-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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