Despite some rough patches, a strong collection embodying the seasoned skill of a master.
Eleven new stories from MacLaverty (The Anatomy School, 2002, etc.) reveal the Irish-born, Glasgow-resident writer’s uncanny knack for elucidating character with telling phrases and homely details.
The title piece, delivered in two parts titled “Learning to Dance” and “Visiting Takabuti,” concerns lessons of loss. Two young boys stay with glamorous parental friends while arrangements for their father’s funeral are made. In “Learning to Dance,” the eldest brother’s perceptions deftly mirror the grief that well-meaning gestures seek to blanket; and “Visiting Takabuti” shows an elderly woman, who lost her only love in WWI, trying to demonstrate to her grand-nephews, by way of a museum mummy exhibit, the soul’s way of bidding adieu. In “The Wedding Ring,” the body of a sheltered Irish virgin killed in 1904 is found and discovered to have been secretly married. Although readers may cheer a woman’s cool-headed way of avenging her rape in “Up the Coast,” forays into her assailant’s skewed consciousness verge too closely to Cape Fear–type melodrama. The most moving story (“The Clinic”) imparts Chekhovian insights to a day of diabetes testing. “A Trusted Neighbour” exposes the naïveté of the narrator’s assumption that religious tolerance reigns in his Belfast neighborhood through the inexplicable treachery of the bland motorcycle-rider who lives next door. “A Belfast Memory” reads like nostalgic fluff until the bitter gall of a soccer team’s persecution bubbles up during a Sunday afternoon tea. Belfast is also the setting for “On the Roundabout,” which details a family’s rescue of a Protestant mistaken for a Fenian, and for “The Trojan Sofa,” about a scheme to burgle Orangemen’s homes. An aged woman is consigned “only temporarily” to a nursing home in “The Assessment,” a finely rendered tale marred by overly familiar subject matter. When a Scottish poet-in-residence at a Midwestern university gets lost in a blizzard (“Winter Storm”), unintended echoes of a Garrison Keillor riff and a pat ending undermine the subject matter’s gravitas.
Despite some rough patches, a strong collection embodying the seasoned skill of a master.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-05716-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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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