A few of the longer, more conventional tales flesh out character and eschew the simply bizarre to explore the landscape of...
A second collection by the author of A Quick Kiss of Redemption (1991) continues the search for redemption in short fictions (some from Harper’s, most from little mags) that borrow their lyric style from the groggiest sort of contemporary long-line poetry. Dabbling in self-consciousness, Means plays with punctuation and ellipses; he often goes streamy when the narrative most demands clarity.
In the typical Means story, perspectives clash or merge in a startlingly odd way. “Railroad Incident, August 1995” shifts from the sad tale of a widower drifting along the railroad tracks in a daze to the story of his persecutors, some local thugs out for kicks. In “The Interruption,” two men of vastly different circumstances—one a solid citizen, the other a vagrant—find their lives changed forever by an odd encounter at a hotel wedding. “Tahorah” relies on sheer coincidence for the narrative convergence: the deaths of two different patients on the same ward, one a curmudgeonly old truck driver, dying from heart failure, the other a young and beloved daughter of an Israeli immigrant. But there’s no cross-class (or cross-cultural) hug-fest here; the ill-assorted characters hurtle into each other, and lots of deaths result. The two-page interlude “What I Hope For” promises no more dying in these stories, but Means quickly breaks his pledge. In fact, he closes with a trio of fictions diminished or curtailed. “The Gesture Hunter” relishes his collection until he realizes he’s been deceived by a movie production crew; the title piece is more a discourse than a story—a disjointed meditation on arson; and the final entry, “The Woodcutter,” involves the suicide of a Vietnam vet given to manically chopping wood.
A few of the longer, more conventional tales flesh out character and eschew the simply bizarre to explore the landscape of the God-worried, the guilt-ridden, the death-haunted. But Means’s artsy gestures undercut his better intentions.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-893956-05-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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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