A delightful menu.
An accomplished debut collection of seven stories demonstrates the versatility of novelist Brown (The Hatbox Baby, 2000, etc.).
The images of these tales are familiar, but their emotion is not. In “Friend to Women,” a middle-aged woman confronts her fading allure and her mortality when she and her husband rent a house near where she grew up; a young artist’s lifelong project of constructing his hometown at scale in “Miniature Man” explains the nature of meaning to the doctor who narrates; a woman’s personal transformation from meaninglessness to content is revealed through her friendship with her daughter’s pen pal in “The Correspondent”; “Father Judge Run” is a dreamy coming-of-age piece featuring a parrot that quotes the Bible; another come-of-ager, “Postman,” is a dual effort and a love story besides, as a young boy and girl find that the company of the other makes the prospect of adulthood bearable and mystically exciting. Reading Brown is like eating a wonderful meal at a restaurant you know so well you can taste the style of the chef. The plots are often sweet, though what they produce in these characters’ minds may not be. In the title story, a macabre pseudo–fairy tale about a woman who accidentally winds up as a Dr. Frankenstein-like undertaker (happily recalling Graham Swift), our narrator speaks as though for the entire volume: “However little I have earned the attention of history, at least it can be said that I have been a faithful guard at the door, that I have sensed, always sensed, the obliterating force of time, the savage way our lives and all their meanings are erased.”
A delightful menu.Pub Date: March 29, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-300-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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