The most successful collection of stories to date by smart, gifted, but somewhat detail-obsessed Tallent (Time with Children, 1987; In Constant Flight, 1983, etc.). Like earlier stories, these nine center on the intimate gestures that reveal couples' and parents' and children's dependencies and rebellions. But, here, no one is abandoned or bereft. All the stories are set in prosperous, hip western enclaves such as Santa Monica and Santa Fe. Babies—frequently twin babies- -and teenagers figure in. In ``Prowler,'' a remarried father of newborn twins breaks into his ex-wife's newly leased apartment, and the small preparations she's made for their teenaged son's visit convince him that she's a worthy mother. In three related pieces- -``Black Dress,'' the title story, and the unusually moving ``The Minute I Saw You''—a father and Nicaraguan-born stepmother living in New Mexico struggle to guide the father's teenage son through the suicide of his girlfriend and, later on, the disappearance of his mother—even as they muddle through pregnancy and a difficult childbirth, missing most of the body's important cues. In ``Earth to Molly,'' an American poet who's suffered a miscarriage ponders but doesn't succumb to an adulterous affair while traveling in Wales; in ``Kid Gentle,'' an Arizona woman who's had a miscarriage buys a horse as an act of defiance and ends up saving her marriage and getting pregnant. In ``Get It Back for Me,'' a ten-year-old girl observes the long, tedious, ongoing domestic quarrel between her parents, who are wrung dry by their twin baby boys. This and, to a lesser degree, other pieces are overloaded with unmeaningful detail; but they're also full of beautiful moments whose central message is that intimate recognition is the same as love. Strong stories.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-58304-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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