Clear-eyed takes on women’s lives that offer some redeeming balm.
A sixth collection from Cooper (The Wake of the Wind, 1998, etc.), brimming over with all her usual upbeat insights, humor, and down-home takes on life and living: a mix that has just enough vinegar to avoid seeming too saccharine or facile.
The four stories here all explore, some more effectively than others, the theme of the inescapable indivisibility of the past and the future in people’s lives, futures that, Cooper notes, are built like houses, “a brick or plank a day.” In the first and least successful piece, “A Shooting Star”—the tone is more preachy, the moral more pointed—a young woman, now married to her high school sweetheart and leading a virtuous life, tells how the free and easy ways with men of her beautiful and wayward friend Lorene, whom she’s known and often envied since childhood, had gruesome repercussions. The “A Fillet of Soul” is a love story with a twist, as Luella, a lonely young woman abandoned by her ne’er do well suitor in a strange city without money, is advised to sell her favors in order to pay her debts—a fate she manages to escape when she at last finds true romance. Meanwhile, Vinnie, an overworked and financially struggling single mother in “The Eagle Flies” (the best story here), watches an eagle with a wounded wing fly regularly over her house, and somehow finds the courage to stand up to her grasping, selfish children and fall in love again. And in “The Lost and the Found,” an old woman, Mrs. Everly, observing that the biggest fools are the ones who think they’re having fun making fools of everyone else, recalls a young woman by the name of Irene who turned the tables on her lover Cool, a sweet-talker who had no intention of settling down—yet.
Clear-eyed takes on women’s lives that offer some redeeming balm.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49680-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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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