An impressive collection, cleareyed and penetrating.
Following three novels (A Million Heavens, 2012, etc.), Brandon offers his first story collection: 11 offbeat, open-ended tales in which unmoored people make impulsive decisions.
"Palatka" is representative. Pauline and Mal are neighbors in a ratty rental building. The 17-year-old Mal dates recklessly, and the somewhat older Pauline feels a motherly concern, especially when Mal goes missing. But here’s the twist: Envying Mal’s free spirit, Pauline suddenly emulates it with a questionable bar pickup, leaving us in enjoyable suspense. Even more captivating is "The Picnickers." Kim is visiting Rita in Chicago for a week. They’re old friends, mid-30s, but when Rita organizes a group of women to visit an outlet mall, Kim, who’s single, prefers a field trip with Franklin, Rita’s teenage son. Franklin is a supersmart loner, and the two hit it off; he drives them to an actual field, Kim faint with desire, which is inappropriate perhaps but feels wonderful. Stories that don’t quite work are "The Midnight Gales" and "The Differing Views," both of which dabble in the surreal. In the former, members of a community are randomly abducted; in the latter, a guy in a condo, devastated after a breakup, sees seven human brains on the floor, presumably projections of his angst. What to do? Brandon seems at a loss about how to make use of those brains. He's at the top of his game with "The Inland News," taking a familiar storyline (police chief uses psychic to solve murder) and beautifully rearranging it. Sofia, done with college, lives with her adoptive uncle Tunsil, a kindly cop. Sofia has psychic powers, and to help her handle them, Tunsil arranges supervised interviews with suspects in a murder case. Sofia “sees” the murder, but that’s far from the end, as Brandon embeds the extraordinary in an otherwise ordinary life.
An impressive collection, cleareyed and penetrating.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-938073-94-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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