Drain writes with fierce warmth about characters coping with crushing racism and poverty in this impressive debut.
A collection of linked short stories takes readers inside life in Chicago’s Stateway Gardens projects.
This debut book is set mostly in the 1980s in one of the South Side’s largest, most segregated housing projects. Stateway Gardens’ eight high-rise apartment blocks (built in the 1950s and demolished by 2007) formed a neighborhood notorious for grinding poverty, violence, drug use, and crime. Drain, who grew up in Chicago, writes intimately of the human experiences of those who lived there. The stories are linked by a group of characters who are relatives and friends of a pair of brothers, Tracy and Jacob. Tracy narrates several of the stories, beginning with “B.B. Sauce,” which takes place when he’s 6 years old. He’s the younger brother, “my mother’s smart child, but Jacob was the handsome one with the precious button nose and eyelashes that flapped like dove wings.” Their rivalry will play out for years. Neither boy’s father is in the picture, and several of the stories revolve around the heartbreaking irony of a single mother who works so many hours and jobs to support her children that she has no time to be with them. For Tracy, though, that’s just one of the realities of his world. It’s a world so harshly limited that in “Wet Paper Grass,” Tracy, Jacob, and their friend Jameel undertake a harrowing journey just to hang out on a community college campus miles away: “It was our summer resort….We imagined ourselves as those rich North Side white kids being sent to European cities we’d never manage to spell.” But just getting there puts eight-year-old Tracy in mortal peril. In “The Stateway Condo Gentrification,” teenage Tracy—still the smart one—realizes that in some ways living in the projects is “no different than living in those condos that weren’t more than four miles north of us on Michigan Avenue.…You could see the entire city from our fourteenth-floor ramp.” It turns out to be a prescient observation.
Drain writes with fierce warmth about characters coping with crushing racism and poverty in this impressive debut.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984818-16-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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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