A captivating assemblage of philosophical and meditative tales.
A collection of short stories that revolve around the history of a small town in Kentucky.
Summers’ (Ruadan, 2017, etc.) new collection of 20 tales is bound by a common locale—Lynch’s Corner, Kentucky—and covers its history from 1893 to 1986. The stories all share an artfully crafted atmosphere of austerity as they unblinkingly confront the harsh realities of life. In the first story, “Fair Game,” two close friends, Carson York and Thomas Mason, travel from Lynch’s Corner to Chicago to see the World’s Fair in 1893. After Thomas suddenly vanishes, Carson discovers that he’s not only dead—he’s also been sold to a hospital by a “resurrector,” a collector of corpses. Although it’s likely that Thomas was murdered, the hospital administrator recommends that Carson go home with a story that his friend died of a “sudden illness.” In “Rite of Fire,” set in 1898, Lynch’s Corner deputy sheriff John Reichmuth learns that a local woman, Bernice Caraway, was burned to death for witchcraft—because she simply used herbal remedies to heal the sick. However, it’s revealed that the men who killed her had other motives as well, and they all suffer mysterious accidents in the wake of her death. In these tales, Summers often provides profound meditations on the meaning of history and the lure of the past. For example, in “Blazing Noon,” set in 1904, Donnie greets information about his ancestors with a compelling mix of curiosity and skepticism: “I believe we chase the shadows of youth across the years, throughout our adult lives. And we never quite grasp that the joys belonged to someone else. We all change.” Throughout this collection, the author’s prose is self-assured and free of needless contrivance, and he shows considerable, nuanced skill at plot and character development. Overall, this is an excellent example of regional literature that offers readers a sense of universality, mined from concrete elements of everyday life.
A captivating assemblage of philosophical and meditative tales.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72421-410-2
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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