Tough-as-nails stories of blue-collar men running low on chances, luck and hope, by the author of the novel If I Don’t Six (not reviewed). In Reid’s universe there are two kinds of jobs: bad ones that you can, with difficulty, stomach, and awful ones that you can’t. His protagonists—carpenters, machinists, handymen, almost all desperate for work—have only their pride and native wit to sustain them. And that isn’t enough. They drink too much, find most women unobtainable, dream of a life spent free of bosses, and know that “salary is the working man’s cancer.” Maynard (in “Lime”), down on his luck after a disastrous stint on a fishing boat, reluctantly takes on the job of caretaker at a farm owned by wealthy dilettantes. The disposal of the rotting corpse of a horse becomes the focus of a power struggle as his employer attempts to humiliate and break him, and he tries in turn, despairingly, to outwit her. In “Overtime,” Drew, a harried supervisor at a printing plant, forces a reluctant worker to put in overtime. When the man’s daughter is murdered as a result of his absence, Drew begins drinking, loses his wife and his job—and discovers a world of men like him, “out on the streets, looking for work, slightly out of shape, losing their hair.” In the title story, two sardonic construction workers in Alaska (“a postcard from hell”) find something worth fighting for when they come across soldiers who are mutilating salmon. The violence that results is liberating; the rootless narrator discovers that he “wants to know what the salmon know when they’re blasting upstream to die.” Repeatedly here, extremity is the only thing left worth having; several narrators, such as the protagonist of “Laura Borealis,” discover that only at the moment when they—re facing violence can they come close to feeling happy, unfettered. Strong, unsettling tales, narrated in a spare, pungent prose; further evidence that writing about the working classes, once a staple of American fiction, isn’t extinct yet.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-49121-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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