Reading McGarry’s stories (Home at Last, 1994, etc.) is to be surprised and delighted.
After a second novel (Gallagher’s Travels, 1997), McGarry returns to her strength, the short story, with a knockout fourth collection of wonderfully honed, superbly quirky tales exploring the modern-day crises of relationship-weary men and women.
McGarry is equally comfortable in the voices of men and women, and it’s hard to find a weak link among these 13 stories, subdivided into two sections entitled “His” and “Hers.” The first, “Among the Philistines,” delineates the staccato movements of an arrogant, on-the-rise Latin scholar whose field trip to New York City—involving a quick bedding of his mistress, a sudden appearance by his handsomely pedigreed wife, and an explosive dinner among the tenured academic Olympiads—turns tragically hubristic. The following tale, “The Thin Man,” begins with the startling sentence “In one year I lost a hundred pounds” and recounts the strange, unsettling birthday of pampered, privileged 41-year-old Charles Francis LaSalle and the mysterious attraction he holds over “wounded creatures.” The longest in this section, “The Secret of His Sleep,” is also the story in which McGarry indulges her impish perverseness. A regular guy, George McCoy, living in a place called Plainfield, “wakes up” from a 40-year-sleep and must reacquaint himself with his listless wife, young genius son, and the consequences of a heretofore-blank existence. When she’s at her strongest, McGarry ’s prose is fresh, her plots unpredictable, and her dialogue shimmeringly wry—as in the pointed exchange between George and his dead father in an empty afternoon bar; at her weakest, she is oblique and abruptly elliptical, as at moments in the final piece, “The Last Time,” involving Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, and an unnamed live-in at their rue de Fleurus apartment. Many of the stories here appeared in small literary or academic publications. They deserve wider circulation.
Reading McGarry’s stories (Home at Last, 1994, etc.) is to be surprised and delighted.Pub Date: June 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-8018-6937-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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