A fine writer is here tried (tired?) and true.
No one will ever accuse Baxter of literary frivolity—and that’s the problem.
In these eight stories, even the most casual events come bathed in sociopolitical gloss, often to the detriment of Baxter’s modest narrative instincts. “Believers,” the novella that takes up a large part of this volume, strives for world-historical significance to explain one man’s loss of faith: the narrator's father, a former Catholic priest who was seduced from his bumpkin modesty in the Midwest by a couple of northeastern smarties, a Protestant husband and wife who aspired to be America's answer to the Cliveden set—witty and urbane fascists, with oodles of dough and a fancy estate in Michigan. The narrator’s frustration is simple: He was conceived as a direct result of apostasy and abandoned celibacy. Such clear and easy ironies abound in Baxter's remaining stories as well. In “The Next Building I Plan to Bomb,” a seemingly bland (and heterosexual) midwestern banker finds a threatening message on a piece of paper and decides to act out his own need to be dangerous by engaging in unsafe sex with a young man. Baxter's well-written narratives are distinguished by such surprises—the odd revelation in an apparently ordinary life, like the neighbor who may or may not be a child molester/killer ( “Time Exposure” ); the happily-in-love young slacker who isn’t sure whether her boyfriend is a woman beater or not (“Kiss Away”); and the married father who acts like a fool over his first wife, whom he hasn’t seen since she left him over a decade ago (“Flood Show”). Linked by their underlying concern with the forms of passion, these stories are best exemplified by “The Cures For Love,” a relatively modest tale of a classics teacher who finds solace in Ovid. Baxter’s banal commentary about America as mouthed by his characters is slightly more endurable than those same characters’ tendency to write things like “sadness” on grocery lists.
A fine writer is here tried (tired?) and true.Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44267-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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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