A vibrant, diverse collection.
An excellent new edition of this popular anthology.
As might be expected from the author of several carefully researched novels (Prodigal Summer, 2000, etc.), guest editor Kingsolver suggests a predilection for stories with extraordinary content. In a lively introduction, she lays out three criteria for her selections: “They’ve told me something remarkable, they are beautifully executed, and they are nested in truth.” And most of the stories here do have “something remarkable” to tell. Rather than depicting the subtleties of “everyday American life,” these tales usually opt for more exotic subjects. Ha Jin’s “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town” depicts what it’s like to work at an American fast food restaurant in China, while Peter Ho Davies’s “Think of England” takes place in and around a Welsh countryside pub on the night after the D-day landing. Katherine Shonk’s “My Mother’s Garden” presents life near Chernobyl’s contaminated zone, while Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map” centers on a British surveyor in the Himalayas during the 1860s. The stories not set in far-flung locations are often about unusual perspectives, like that of the morbidly obese man in Claire Davis’s “Labors of the Heart” or of the character in Rick Bass’s ultra-factual “The Fireman.” Such tales can leave one with the feeling of having read nonfiction as much as fiction. Kingsolver allows quotidian subject matter only if it’s in the hands of an Alice Munro (“Post and Beam”) or a John Updike (“Personal Archeology”). Younger writers—a generous number are here—have to earn their way by writing about Hong Kong, Madagascar, or Buffalo in the1930s. Also of interest is a posthumously published story by the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West (1907–98).
A vibrant, diverse collection.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-395-92689-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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