The narrator of one story in this collection writes that, when the weather rages, communication is “reduced to hand signals...
A story collection of expansive postmodernism that combines bursts of humor with flashes of tragedy.
Though Shepard (Like You’d Understand, Anyway, 2007, etc.) often writes in the first person, the narrator never sounds like an authorial stand-in and often relates events at a great geographical and/or chronological remove from the reader. In other words, these aren’t stories about what life is like right now, though they may well be about both the possibilities and limitations of words, and of fiction. They aren’t difficult stories, exactly, though some can seem as exasperating as they are amusing or engaging. “Gojira, King of the Monsters” explores the making of the movie that would be known Stateside as Godzilla, in the wake of World War II and its effects on the Japanese film industry. “Man had created war and the Bomb and now nature was going to exact its revenge, with tormented Gojira its way of making radiation visible.” In “Classical Scenes of Farewell,” a medieval manservant gives matter-of-fact accounts of child dismemberment in the 1400s. In “Boys Town,” a psychologically beleaguered vet and wife abuser who lives with his mother opens his account: “Here’s the story of my life: whatever I did wasn’t good enough, anything I figured out I figured out too late, and whenever I tried to help I made things worse.” The accuracy of his self-assessment aside, he proves to be a very unreliable narrator. “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” concerns avalanche research in the Alps of the late 1930s, when a man contemplates his relationship with his late, twin brother—a snow casualty—and his ardor for his brother’s girlfriend. Within these stories, the connections of causality (or lack thereof) occasionally recall Donald Barthelme. The volume concludes with another story about fatal mountains, on a Polish climbing expedition toward a peak known as “a widow maker” and the domestic life left below.
The narrator of one story in this collection writes that, when the weather rages, communication is “reduced to hand signals with mittens.” Some of this writing feels like that.Pub Date: March 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59482-2
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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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