If some of the endings are rushed or unconvincing or just plain AWOL, that’s because Burke understands that conflicts like...
Eleven violent, heartfelt slices of life among the underdogs of the Louisiana bayous and Texas plains from acclaimed mystery novelist Burke (Pegasus Descending, 2006, etc.).
Burke’s volcanic novels of guilt, revenge and redemption wouldn’t have pegged him as a master of the highly wrought short story. Yet he’s something even better: a natural storyteller with a feeling for unequal conflicts and the pain of impotence and humiliation. Within a page or two, he can hook you with the tale a retired professor menaced by a cadre of swaggering hunters (“Winter Light”) or, in a virtual rehash of the same plot, a rancher who takes up for a young woman harassed by a biker gang in “A Season of Regret.” In “The Night Johnny Ace Died” and “Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine,” starry-eyed small-time hoods cross paths with criminal headliners, with results as touching as they are predictable. A running argument between an oil-rig driller and a dynamiter swells to a roar before it subsides in “Water People.” Several entries visit the territory in the wake of Katrina. The title story strands a pair of young musicians in the floodwaters waiting for rescue by Jesus or a charismatic gangster, and “Mist” follows a shattered survivor determined to stay off drugs and the streets despite repeated relapses. But Burke’s voice is just as urgent when he’s describing a murderous raid in Vietnam (“The Village”) or recalling the childhood of boys being raised by their father’s uncaring mistress (“Texas City, 1947”) or standing up to a smooth-talking predator (“The Molester”) or fighting over an American flag against the backdrop of Pearl Harbor (“The Burning of the Flag”).
If some of the endings are rushed or unconvincing or just plain AWOL, that’s because Burke understands that conflicts like these, even spun out to novel length, never truly end.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4856-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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