A gutsy feel-good story, flecked with pain and panache.
What to do when you’re facing the same birthday that prompted your mother to kill herself is the grim premise for this surprisingly upbeat tale of a ruinously dysfunctional family, the third from Hyde (after Monoosook Valley, 1989).
Isabel faces her 41st birthday in Boulder, Colorado, having just tried a separation from her husband Gabe after long, frustrating years of trying to have a child. Back together, they prepare for an unusual celebration as her older sister Ellie and their father are flying in to offer solace through a painful weekend. No amount of preparation can keep Isabel from remembering, however, as images of her mother—the misfit, the manic-depressive, the larger-than-life presence, and the pathological liar—come crowding into her consciousness. Her mother danced with abandon in the rain; she planted an entire steep hillside, the front yard of their Seattle home, with daffodils; she put out cigarettes on her arm; she tried to commit suicide more than once, finally succeeding as her family made plans for her birthday dinner. The remembrances are overwhelming, but Isabel’s weekend has its share of truly traumatic moments as well, as Ellie loses her young daughter briefly at a street fair, long enough for the girl to have an accident that sends them to the emergency room, and whispers to Isabel that she’s getting a divorce. Plus, Gabe finds out that the expensive fertility-drug treatment Isabel had the year before was secretly financed by her sister. The divorce becomes something more, though, when Ellie’s husband calls and reveals that she is more like her mother than anyone had previously suspected. All of which puts a strain on Isabel as well as her long-suffering father, but somehow, by weekend’s close, there’s still plenty of love left to go around.
A gutsy feel-good story, flecked with pain and panache.Pub Date: March 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-931561-03-6
Page Count: 170
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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