Short stories of broke, drink-sodden Scottish youths in various states of distress: a powerful first book by a furiously talented 27-year-old writer. McLean pumps underclass rage and considerable sensitivity through his fairly interchangeable Edinburgh characters, all in their 20s and 30s. His sensibility is dark, very male, and filled with an anger that borders on the irrational—but it's an anger that seems to be born from a head-on understanding of social injustice. All 23 stories—some no longer than a paragraph, some 30 pages long—bear remarkable titles (``Loaves and Fishes, Nah,'' ``A/deen Soccer Thugs Kill All Visiting Fans,'' ``Dying and Being Alive''). They also have deep-hook openings, such as this from ``Cold Kebab Breakfast'': ``They came home from the pub to find their flat had been fucking done over.'' This fiction staggers gracefully along through small, indecisive events and unresolved circumstances: bad jobs or no jobs, fights started to make something happen, cranked-up soccer fans igniting friction at close quarters in dank, grimy pubs, eating curry take-out and having indigestion; men and women trying to determine if they're capable of love while savaging or sexing each other. Over all these little disturbances hover subtle threats of Edinburgh's twin menaces—HIV and heroin. Like Thom Jones's work (both writers, incidentally, were janitors before publishing books), McLean's stories imply a quickened, redemptive understanding of human behavior through dialogue that feels unspeakably sad. Raw, realistic blasts of street-level life—like a drinker's strong breath in your face, but a grudging sentimentality lies underneath the explosive, punk language. A strong, self-assured debut.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-436-27631-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Collins & Brown/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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