Separation anxiety and strong emotion repressed almost to the point of suffocation are the constants that are analyzed—with sometimes excessive precision—in this otherwise impressive gathering of six carefully crafted stories by the author of an earlier collection, In a Father’s Place (1990), and the novel Mason’s Retreat (1996). The premises and animating situations are often quite striking here. “The Late Night News,” for example, forces a complacent widower and ex-husband into panicked self-doubt when a teenaged burglar (“a messenger from the dark”) violates his isolation and security. A husband and father heading home from a job-hunting trip finds in a “ruined” western town (in the moody title story), a chastening reflection of his own unhappy domesticity. “Something Important” about his endangered marriage is revealed to a cautious high-school English teacher by the boorish older brother he disrespects and mistrusts. And a New Englander returned to his late mother’s Montana ranch (in “Room for Mistakes”) makes peace as best he can with his taciturn, cleareyed stepfather. The mingled intimacy and unknowing we share and suffer as family members are unforgettably dramatized in the best pieces. In “A Suitable Good-bye,” thirtysomething freelance consultant Lee travels with his widowed mother and young nephew on a mission to find the grave of her father, who had abandoned his family decades ago—and learns that their journey has been a gesture intended to soothe Lee’s own incompletion and loneliness. And the superb “Things Left undone” charts the emotional odyssey of dairy farmer Denny McCready and his wife Susan, their marriage ripped apart when their infant son dies of inherited cystic fibrosis, then tentatively given the possibility of repair as they labor to forgive each other and themselves. There’s a little of Tobias Wolff in Tilghman’s rigorous focus on how family concerns define us and haunt us. The way his people run occasionally feels contrived, but in his best stories we feel deeply for them and wish them safely home again.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44971-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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