Gardam’s brisk narration and fearless temperament make for serious fun.
The British Gardam (The Queen of the Tambourine, 2007, etc.) excels once again in this collection of 14 wide-ranging stories.
The author corrals a variety of surprising characters, especially the old and the late middle-aged. The ancient dodderers of the title story include Old Filth himself (from Gardam’s 2004 novel of the same name), a guest at a party for a prospective Jesuit monk. Dulcie, the gin-swilling hostess, had fallen for the monk at a cathedral; though her guest mysteriously vanishes, there’s still the promise of rejuvenation for these old codgers, or even love. That’s what the female narrator of “Pangbourne” finds, at her local zoo, as she dotes on a gorilla: “I knew him for a gentle beast.” She’s a sympathetic old dear, unlike the grizzled pessimists in “The Flight Path,” a cautionary tale about givers and getters set in London in 1941 during the Blitz. Wartime London is grippingly evoked, and Gardam settles the fate of this grim crew with a charming ruthlessness; some complacent nobodies in “Babette” (in which a forgotten novelist leads her discerning reviewer to hidden treasures) are also summarily dispatched. The author demonstrates her range in “Waiting for a Stranger,” a shivery Halloween story alive with tricks and treats and racial ill-will; “The Virgins of Bruges,” in which a Parisian nun, looking for sanctuary in an unfamiliar city, stumbles onto a nightmarish scene, a church converted into a druggy nightclub; and “Snap,” the story of a heroically faithful wife whose one night of adultery ends with a broken ankle. Gardam’s technical proficiency doesn’t always hold up. A mother, a daughter, the daughter’s best friend and a hairdresser compete for attention in the overcrowded “The Hair of the Dog”; and point-of-view switches make “The Fledgling” (18-year-old leaves home for college) rather awkward. But she navigates the passage of time skillfully in “The Last Reunion.” Here four women come together for a college reunion after 40 years, and lyrical memories collide painfully with present reality.
Gardam’s brisk narration and fearless temperament make for serious fun.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933372-56-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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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