Mississippi's literary powerhouse returns with another group of stories (Airships, 1978; the novels Boomerang, Never Die, etc.) in which the surreal social vision and subsurface savagery that have become Hannah's hallmarks are present in abundance. Twenty-three pieces ranging widely in length from one to forty pages make up this collection, and the various themes are no less diverse. The brief title story (``Bats Out of Hell Division'') re- creates a Civil War standoff in which desperate, starving Rebels finally assault their well-armed, well-fed adversaries with little more than a military band playing Tchaikovsky—only to win the field when the Union troops are so moved by the sight that they surrender. ``Rat-faced Auntie'' is a more substantial tale involving a talented trombonist who peaks too soon, losing himself to liquor and dropping into sociology as a consolation, with his bills paid by a sour, shriveled Auntie Hadley, who wants him to write her biography instead of telling the stories of the skid-row bums he met before she rescued him. Another biographer appears in ``Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?'' as a successful writer of celebrity bios—whose secret passion is shooting innocent passersby with an air rifle he keeps hidden in his car—tries to understand his angry poet-son, who loses his desire to write, his university job, his wife, and his sanity by the age of 30, turning to Mormonism before finally regaining his equilibrium and his voice. Warped family situations, individual frustrations, intimations of perversion, and the just-plain strange are common threads throughout here, combined in Hannah's dazzling, bizarre style. A compelling concatenation, even if sometimes overwrought or marred by seemingly superficial weirdness.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1993
ISBN: 0-395-48883-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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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