Intriguing short fiction, told in a distinctive, poetic prose.
A dozen taut and mysterious tales by Canadian poet and novelist Gaston (The Good Body, 2001) explore powerful addictions, cravings and desires.
Many of the stories have narrators who are unreliable because they are high: on beer in “Driving Under the Influence,” about a newly jilted fellow who cruises repeatedly through a police roadblock between fill-ups at bars, his eye on the female cop; on heroin in “The Little Drug Addict That Could,” about a beer-drinker who tries to help his nephew kick his habit and ends up “chipping” in the men’s room of a local bar (“nursing on Eve,” as his nephew puts it); on whiskey in “The Angels’ Share,” about a woman, “humbled by many kinds of hunger,” who comes out of the wilderness and joins a group drinking around a campfire; on a lifetime of connoisseurship in the case of Van Luven, of “The Alcoholist,” who is trying to create one last distinctive blond beer before dying of cirrhosis. Gaston is so skillful that he draws you along on the ride, following each narrator’s convincing storyline while allowing you simultaneously to sense the distortion of the drug. “Where It Comes From, Where It Goes” involves a different kind of altered state as a faith healer recollects the onset of his gift—he saved his daughter from leukemia—and also discovers that people have been stealing from his voluntary contribution box. “A Forest Path” is narrated by the bastard son of the notorious drinker/author Malcolm Lowry, who tracks the antics of his mother, an “eccentric and literary lush.” The title piece is a masterpiece of rationalization, the story of a father who medicates his troubled 12-year-old daughter on cannabis. It’s told in a series of letters to the authorities who have removed her from his custody after neighbors turned him in as a drug-dealer and abusive father.
Intriguing short fiction, told in a distinctive, poetic prose.Pub Date: April 30, 2005
ISBN: 1-55192-451-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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