Jones’s engrossing, exquisitely crafted and unforgettable stories offer images of the African-American experience that are...
The punishing legacy of poverty, crime and racism spans several generations, in the Hemingway Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s long-awaited second collection.
Wielding with enviable precision the elegant, plain style that so distinguished his earlier stories (gathered as Lost in the City, 1992) and single novel (The Known World, 2003), Jones probes deeply the wounded yet often resilient psyches of an imposing gallery of vivid, varied characters. A convicted murderer released from prison after 20 years finds unapproachable the family he had disappointed and betrayed, but makes himself of use by tenderly preparing the body of a former acquaintance for burial (“Old Boys, Old Girls”). A young girl raised among a family blighted by alcoholism and lawlessness glimpses a hopeful future in the promise of a school that accepts, nurtures and challenges her (“Spanish in the Morning”). A retired army officer cannot control his lifelong appetite for younger women and fast living and becomes—in a way he had not foreseen—“A Rich Man.” Elsewhere, one woman meets the Devil in a Safeway supermarket, another is struck blind while riding a bus—and their ordeals redefine them, stunningly. A “blessed one” who mysteriously survives catastrophes that claim numerous less-fortunate souls reaches a hard-won maturity, and eventually comprehends the nature of her “gift” and the obligations she must accept (“A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru”). Like Alice Munro’s, Jones’s stories exfoliate unpredictably, embracing multiple characters and interconnected histories and destinies. In “Common Law,” domestic violence infects and transforms a peaceful neighborhood. In the brooding title story, a Korean War vet’s murder investigation proves that “Blood spilled with violence never goes away.” And in the magnificent “Root Worker,” a woman doctor learns from an aged “voodoo woman” that we are often helplessly and unknowingly the cause of our own—and our loved ones’—pain.
Jones’s engrossing, exquisitely crafted and unforgettable stories offer images of the African-American experience that are unparalleled in American fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-055756-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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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