One of the masters displays his wares, to stunning effect.
Matchless narrative economy and surgically precise prose are the identifying marks of this exemplary gathering: ten stories by the semi-legendary veteran author (Burning the Days, 1997, etc.)
Sex, betrayal, aging and death are dominant themes, whether in a night of shared palaver among manless “girl” friends that ends in a plaintive cry for attention (“Such Fun”); a vignette showing a charismatic, unstable male friend’s effect on a complacent marriage (“Give”); or the tale (“Bangkok”) of a married bookseller’s resistance to the promiscuous former lover who challenges him to choose between “Life and a kind of pretend life.” Salter’s great gift is his ability to trace the arc of an entire life, or several shared or separated lives, with a masterly fusion of crisp dialogue and penetrating summary statement. In “Comet,” for example, the future of a seemingly successful second marriage is adumbrated in the wife’s sardonic acknowledgement of her new husband’s history of infidelities. D.H. Lawrence might have devised the haunting symbolism that pervades “My Lord You,” in which an unhappy wife’s fixation on a self-destructive poet is crystallized in the figure of his enormous dog, which follows her silently (“its shoulders moving smoothly, like a kind of machine”). Elsewhere, a heartless, calculating “party girl” is “handled” (in “Platinum”) by the wealthy lawyer who shares her with his errant-son-in-law (it reads like a combination of Edith Wharton and John O’Hara). The grief felt by a stockbroker too timid to seize the happiness offered him is depicted in “Palm Court,” and a career army man’s victimization by his selfish Czech wife, and eventual escape from her spell into the consolations of tradition and responsibility, is etched in seven icy pages in “Arlington.” All Salter’s themes merge memorably in the concluding (title) story, a compact symphony of mutual devotion, human frailty and lingering regret.
One of the masters displays his wares, to stunning effect.Pub Date: April 25, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4312-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
