A necessary gathering of stories by a writer Saul Bellow rightly called one of the best of his generation.
Hoagland, widely celebrated as a travel writer, essayist and environmentalist, serves up a retrospective of his short fiction.
He hasn't published many stories in his 81 years, but Hoagland is a master of the form. The tales, mostly from the 1960s, are decidedly downbeat. Self-delusion plagues its drifters, carnival attractions and assorted nowhere men like a contagion, and the women don't come off especially well, either. In "The Final Fate of the Alligators" (1969), seaman Arnie Bush finds sexual contentment and a sense of personal "gravity" in his four years with an oft-married laundromat owner in Galveston, Texas. But when her controlling nature emerges, he leaves her and their young daughter and resettles in a dumpy New York apartment—with a bathtub-dwelling alligator. In the title story, from 2005, Jake Thibodeau, a New England Wall of Death motorcyclist on the down side of his career, tests his mortality under the worst conditions—before lowlifes who couldn't care less about his fate. In "The Last Irish Fighter" (1960), a faded boxer named Kelly, surrounded by ropes "wrapped in cloth a funeral black," is stunned and impressed by an opponent with strange moves and wicked sucker punches. Other stories are set in a hospital morgue, a rodeo and on the frontier, where no better fortunes await. For all its bleakness, though, the collection is lifted by the author's perfectly tempered irony and exquisite descriptions. Hoagland is from the old school: He makes every word count, but not in the minimalist manner of many younger writers. These stories don't feel confined, opening up worlds we may never before have glimpsed.
A necessary gathering of stories by a writer Saul Bellow rightly called one of the best of his generation.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62872-448-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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