Another impressive addition to an already impressive oeuvre.
Elegance and versatility—those familiar Barnes strengths define this latest story collection from the distinguished British author.
Six of these 14 stories are about contemporary relationships; another four are miscellaneous; and there’s a quartet called "At Phil & Joanna’s," presenting four separate evenings of dinner-table conversation. The same hosts and guests form a group of upper-middle-class Londoners; well-fed, well-lubricated, kicking back. Their collective profile is fun-loving, casually erudite, liberal and bawdy. The conversation ranges from dog poop and prosthetic testicles to Latin tags and climate change to an overview of sex and love. Barnes artfully calibrates their dialogue so that it transcends brittle repartee to convey warm conviviality and humanist concern. Two of the relationship stories ("East Wind" and "Trespass") feature male protagonists looking for a mate. In ways both funny and painful, they fumble their approaches to women. Two others are not quite so successful; "Sleeping with John Updike" fails to live up to its risqué title, while in "Gardeners’ World," marital problems are obscured by horticultural detail. Their partial failure is more than redeemed by "Marriage Lines," a wrenching study of a young widower’s grief, and the powerful title story about two marriages. The narrator’s admiration for his parents’ enduring intimacy grows as his own marriage crumbles. To diversify the collection, Barnes moves back in time."Carcassonne" is a piquant inquiry into erotic attraction; the great Italian liberator Garibaldi figures prominently. Further back, in 18th-century Vienna, a most unusual doctor seeks to cure the blindness of a musical prodigy. The formal narration fits the period like a glove ("Harmony"). Most memorable, though, is "The Limner." Long ago, a humble artist traveled on horseback, seeking commissions to paint portraits. Wadsworth was also a deaf mute. He is stiffed by a pompous bureaucrat, but nonetheless gives his undeserving sitter the dignity he craved. It is a moving affirmation of true dignity.
Another impressive addition to an already impressive oeuvre.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59526-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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