Elusive, allusive and moving—perhaps the author’s best work in this form since Legends of the Fall (1979).
The primal existential wound that festers in all Harrison’s fiction (The English Major, 2008, etc.) meets its equal, though not its master, in love.
Patsy Cline’s “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me” is the theme song for these three new novellas. Sarah, the engaging teenage heroine of the title work, has a Bible-thumping mother who does her a favor by running off and a father who’s always preoccupied by someone else. The elderly Montana cowboy with whom she has a platonic but sexually charged friendship dies on her; then she’s drugged and raped. Music and reading nurture Sarah as she plots revenge, but she’s too nice to wreak the kind of havoc often featured in Harrison’s work, and she’s rewarded with the love of a Mexican pianist/botany professor in the tentatively hopeful conclusion. The author’s insouciant alter ego drifts as usual through “Brown Dog Redux,” drinking too much and lusting after every woman he sees while remaining hopelessly infatuated with social worker Gretchen, but B.D. also gets a modestly happy ending, which he deserves. He may be incapable of planning ahead or getting a grip, but B.D. is “one of those very rare men who, for better or worse, knew exactly who he was.” Samuel, narrator of “The Games of Night,” has far more ferocious appetites; bitten by a wolf pup at age 12, he falls prey to terrifying attacks at each full moon, when he engages in violent sex and kills wild animals—humans as well, it’s hinted—with his bare hands. After 18 years “trying to run ahead of my disease” (the word werewolf is never used), Samuel finds solace with his adolescent love Emelia, though he knows he probably won’t live to 40. This dark yet radiant tale views his affliction as simply an extreme example of the human condition: “That is us in our wild play.”
Elusive, allusive and moving—perhaps the author’s best work in this form since Legends of the Fall (1979).Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1934-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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