One of the best contemporary short-story writers in peak form.
In her fourth collection of gritty, grueling stories, the Illinois author (City Boy, 2004, etc.) emerges as something very like America’s Alice Munro.
Lives of girls and women (an early Munro title) are Thompson’s province. Its occupants include the high-school misfit (“The Brat”) whose defensive friendship with an obese, resentful classmate nurtures the kind of paranoid rage that erupts all too often in school shootings; a suburban mom (“The Woman Taken in Adultery”) whose willful quest for freedom only confirms the limits that constrain her; and the deeply conventional Iowa widow whose commitment to housewifely routine (“Pie of the Month”) ultimately cannot distance her from a world at war and threatened by ongoing radical change. Each of the 12 stories is precisely fashioned, distinguished by complex and unsparing characterizations and studded with metaphors made from the stuff of everyday life (“You never got to the place where you could stand back and admire your happiness like it was a picture on the wall”) and wry acknowledgements of the sheer drudgery of living (“You’re supposed to say the years flew by without your noticing but…I felt their shape and weight at every step”). Even when not at her best, as in a somewhat unfocused glimpse of a woman’s flight to Alaska from the married lover whom she nevertheless cannot forget (“The Inside Passage”), or the title story’s mixed-emotions memory of a female friend who succumbs to alcoholism and cancer, the tangle of these stories’ relationships, and their narrators’ urgent insistence to understand themselves and to be understood, is compelling. And in two great stories—a wrenching anatomy of infidelity and remarriage (“A Normal Life”) that memorably dramatizes the biblical parable that we reap what we sow, and a hilariously moving account of a middleclass clan (“The Family Barcus”) malformed and traumatized by its Babbitt-like dad—Thompson rivals Munro at her greatest.
One of the best contemporary short-story writers in peak form.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4182-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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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