Archer aptly cites O. Henry, along with Saki and John Buchan, as his masters, but the real model for these tales is the...
Despite the title, none of the 14 stories megaselling Archer (The Eleventh Commandment, 1998, etc.) exhibits here are abridgements of potential novels; practically all of them are expansions of paragraph-length anecdotes.
The tendency to embroider pat morals is clearest from the titles of the nine stories based on actual incidents. A champion of apartheid receives a tolerance transplant along with the heart of the African his automobile killed in “A Change of Heart.” A house built on the troubled border of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland comes under attack in “Both Sides Against the Middle.” The brief “Love at First Sight” could easily have been boiled down further to an anniversary toast, or still further to “boy meets girl.” Even when Archer’s detailing the confidence schemes that give shape to so many of these tales—the hoary deception in “Something for Nothing,” the more elaborate moneymaking plot in “Crime Pays,” the plausible suitor who lays siege to a wealthy wife in “Too Many Coincidences”—their cleverness takes a backseat to the image of the conscientious recorder jotting down notes from a daily newspaper. The stories Archer makes up himself are just as foursquare and functional in their moralizing. A wealthy widower tests the affections of his heirs by pretending to be bankrupt in “The Endgame.” A self-regarding artist who spends a lifetime sponging off his brother gets his comeuppance in “Chalk and Cheese.” Everybody at Critchley’s Bank wishes he were somebody else in “The Grass is Always Greener . . . ,” a theme treated just as effectively a hundred years ago, and at a third the length, in O. Henry’s “The Social Triangle.”
Archer aptly cites O. Henry, along with Saki and John Buchan, as his masters, but the real model for these tales is the after-dinner speaker who wouldn’t dream of taxing your brain after the long day you’ve had.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018552-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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