Lovers of Lassie, Come Home should be forewarned—but more adventurous readers may find Bradford’s uniquely daring and...
If you’re an admirer of David Lynch movies, you won’t want to miss this surpassingly bizarre debut collection—the work of a young Virginia writer and (as it happens) filmmaker.
It takes its time getting to you. A few of the 12 “stories” are little more than in-your-face fragments: “The Texas School for the Blind” and “South for the Winter,” for example, seem to be ideas left insufficiently developed. But even in the fuller narratives, Bradford’s unnamed first-person narrators are misfits without visible means of support or discernible moral natures—like the slacker protagonist of “Catface,” who passively relates his mistreatment by a succession of grand mal–eccentric apartment mates; or the just-barely-bemused visitor to “The House of Alan Matthews,” where a dope dealer keeps an acquaintance locked in a crawlspace. Stories in which Bradford gives his deranged imagination room to roam about are invariably better: a lurid cautionary tale about an intemperate loner (“Bill McQuill”) who lives too close to the railroad tracks; a Harry Crews–like yarn in which a dimwitted “practitioner . . . of chainsaw tricks” meets the masochist of his dreams; and “Roslyn’s Dog,” a dark and perfectly controlled fable of captivity and metamorphosis. Man’s best friend in fact pads confidently throughout Bradford’s cartoonlike lunar landscapes—nowhere more memorably than in the collection’s pièce de résistance “Dogs,” which begins when its narrator cheats on his girlfriend with her bitch (yes, literally), and gathers to its monstrous bosom a singing “muskrat,” a pregnant woman in an iron lung, and a canine barbershop quartet, the whole coalescing into a frenzied parable of paternity and unbelonging that’s one of the most eerily original American stories to come down the pike since the heyday of Flannery O’Connor.
Lovers of Lassie, Come Home should be forewarned—but more adventurous readers may find Bradford’s uniquely daring and provocative stories well worth their attention. (His first film, How’s Your News?, is scheduled to air on HBO this summer.)Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41232-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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