More like bits and sketches than stories, from a writer who is often very funny and inventive, and occasionally profound.
Stories about storytelling from a young Israeli author.
With stories this short (many are a paragraph or two or a page or two, making the 22 pages of the penultimate “Surprise Party” feel like an epic), every word counts, so it’s quite possible that something has been lost in the translation (with no slight intended to the three translators credited, including noted author Nathan Englander). However these stories might read differently in Hebrew, and signify something different within a different cultural context, they function like fables and parables, fairy tales and jokes, with goldfish that grant wishes, parallel universes, an insurance agent who suffers (and then prospers) from his own lack of insurance, a woman who mourns her miscarriage with a creative-writing course (with her husband becoming jealous of the instructor and responding by writing his own revelatory stories). Bookending the collection are two stories featuring a writer as protagonist, a first-person narrator that the reader is invited to identify as the author, who is being forced to perform the act of writing for the benefit of others. The first, the title story, finds him coerced to create at gunpoint, conjuring a plot that proceeds to transpire within the story as he takes some pleasure from “creating something out of something.” The final story, “What Animal Are You?,” shows the self-conscious writer being filmed for a TV feature as he’s in the process of writing (or at least simulating it), wondering whether a hooker might seem more natural on camera as his wife than his wife does. His pieces elicit comparison to sources as diverse as Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut and Woody Allen. He also recalls Lydia Davis in his compression and Donald Barthelme in his whimsy. Yet the stories are hit-and-miss, some of them slight or obvious, though the suggestion that “in the end, everyone gets the Hell or the Heaven he deserves” might be a fantasy that readers will wish were true.
More like bits and sketches than stories, from a writer who is often very funny and inventive, and occasionally profound.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-3745-3333-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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