This second collection by the author of The Garden State (1988) gathers 13 slick but formulaic stories, half of which have appeared in small magazines. Krist profiles a number of suburban misfits in these fictions, three of which chronicle a teenaged boy's view of his parents' crumbling marriage. His mother suffers a miscarriage (``Ghost Story''); grows increasingly erratic until she finds fulfilling work in a zoo (``Giant Step''); and flirts with a handsome college boy while summering without dad on the Jersey shore (``Numbers''). More flighty women people stories about an indexer separated from her philandering husband (the title story); a lesbian college administrator who can't adjust to separation from her lover (``Safe Houses''); and a mysterious woman named Alice who appears from nowhere in a man's life and disappears just as mysteriously (``Ever Alice''). Men fare no better in Krist's tales of failed relationships—certainly not the young man leaving a girlfriend who suffers from MS in ``Baggage,'' nor the divorced dad whose daughter doesn't want to see him in ``Eclipse.'' The real oddballs here provide some comic relief: there's the young embalmer, the son of a former call girl, who wants to leave Westchester County for the freedom of Alaska (``Hungry''); the elderly, left-wing homosexual photographer who refuses to acknowledge his diminished capacities even to his sympathetic bisexual nephew (``Uncle Issac''); and the truly oafish young man who lives with his widowed mother in Brooklyn, and who's flabbergasted by her pregnancy and impending marriage (``Unique Szechuan II''). No story stands out in this calculated collection of contemporary goofiness. Sharp dialogue and an economic style can't compensate for utter predictability.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-182064-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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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