Wilson’s dark world can become monotonous, but there’s no denying its raw power.
After his first novel (Ballistics, 2013), the Canadian Wilson offers a collection of 12 stories about testosterone-fueled men in a small town.
Invermere is in the Kootenay Valley, beneath the Canadian Rockies. Several stories feature John and Will Crease, a father and son. John is a veteran cop in the valley’s small towns. In "The Elasticity of Bone," he’s about to leave for Kosovo, a war zone, to train police recruits; the night before, he wrestles 17-year-old Will in a judo tournament. Then, he’s back from Kosovo with a bullet wound in his chest ("Reception"). Early the next morning, he’s challenging Will to use the punching bag with him. Some years later, in the title story, using a pulley for a tug of war while “engaged in a lifelong game of one-upmanship,” he accidentally breaks Will’s knuckles. Wilson delivers his own punch in his portrayal of these strong, stubborn men, their blood keeping them close yet unable to voice their feelings, about women or anything else. There’s a far different father-son relationship in "Valley Echo." The pipe fitter Conner and his wife are hash addicts, which is rough on their son, Winch. Fortunately, he has a lifeline in his gramps, who teaches him how to shoot. His death (natural causes) leaves Winch bereft but with enough strength to fight his dad (more broken knuckles). Fists are always flying in Invermere. This is not Mayberry, Wilson makes clear, too insistently. The hicks, or hoodlums, are always looking for a chance to taunt and bully. Will’s schoolboy buddy Mitch gets his revenge, setting a trap for a hick; the kid dies. Mitch is remorseful ("Don’t Touch the Ground"). When the dealings with the women in their lives go bad, the locals head into the wilderness, suicidally (see "Big Bitchin’ Cow" and, again, the title story); or they start drinking in dumb disbelief ("The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss").
Wilson’s dark world can become monotonous, but there’s no denying its raw power.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-994-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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