A kind of watery world stocked with quirky southern characters slithering through the ooze of their private pursuits. But...
Fifteen funky, often interlocking tales of downtrodden Dixie form Singleton’s second collection (These People Are Us, 2001, not reviewed), flea markets and strange encounters figuring prominently.
The reference point for most of the stories is Forty-Five, South Carolina, and the characters are mostly following the advice at the end of “How to Collect Fishing Lures” (which is all about how to find them in murky water and on the tables of flea-market dealers): “On good days, think of yourself as a lure of some type, only half-human.” The lure used by Mendal’s father in “Show-and-Tell” is made of artifacts and dredged memories as he attempts to woo Mendal’s third-grade teacher, who dated him before she went away to college, with Mendal as the go-between. Madame Tammy, in “When Children Count,” is a college-educated flea-market palm reader whose appeal for a young girl is the fact that she speaks just like her dead momma; the girl, though, remains intent, along with her brother, on a search for their absent father, whom they are convinced they’ll find one day at the flea market selling lost golf balls. “Page-a-Day” is about another college graduate masquerading successfully as a primitive artist who changed his name to Seldom; a visit by a teenaged mother with a sick baby, who thinks Seldom can breathe on the child and cure her, sets in motion a bizarre chain of events that somehow restores equilibrium to his marriage. In the title story, a woman with a tic-tac-toe design carved in her face is more than what she seems—and leads a salesman of restaurant aquariums to question his motivation.
A kind of watery world stocked with quirky southern characters slithering through the ooze of their private pursuits. But there’s never a doubt that these creatures are, for better or worse, entirely human.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-354-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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