by Ellen Gilchrist ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 4, 1996
A seventh collection of nine stories and a novella from the National Book Awardwinner (The Age of Miracles, 1995, etc.) offers an indomitable cast of characters, including the return of a favorite, the unsinkable Nora Jane. Now married to Freddy Harwood and mother to ten-year-old twin girls, Nora Jane figures in several pieces here, including the novella ``Nora Jane and Company.'' Freddy, Nora Jane, and their devoted shadow Nieman Gluuk are such endearing, gentle, happy souls that some pretty severe external forces are needed to punch up the plot. But for this Berkeley bunch, not the assassination by fanatics of a visiting poet, the bombing of Freddy's bookstore by pro-life extremists, or a visitation by the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci can puncture their charmed perspective on life. Following the novella is a story tracing Nora Jane's hectic childhood in New Orleans that throws light on the origins of her exuberant personality. There's also Dan the Golden Retriever, the title character in ``The Dog Who Delivered Papers to the Stars,'' who's caught in a domestic dispute and shot in the neck by a disgruntled husband. Miraculously, he survives, is taken in by a young man with AIDS, and serves as the catalyst for a variety of domestic rearrangements and reprisals. The best of the tales, ``A Man Who Looked Like Me,'' portrays a woman, now in midlife, reveling in the memory of her high school sweetheart. Reflections on the man she should have married, ``a young man who would never be mean, never fail at anything, never be cruel, never stop knowing life was funny,'' are nourishing but not bittersweet, for all of Gilchrist's characters have an admirable zest for life. A winning collection, filled with humor, love, and just enough human meanness to make things interesting. Gilchrist knows how to tell a story.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-31478-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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IN THE NEWS
by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
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
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by Tim O’Brien
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by Tim O’Brien
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by Tim O’Brien
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
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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