Fine stories, well rounded and grounded. Six of the eleven have appeared in The New Yorker.
Eleven old-fashioned stories that take their time but are riveting, muscular, and real.
The ever-capable Barnes (Love, Etc., 2001; the nonfiction Something to Declare, 2002, etc., etc.) is able to write knowingly on an extraordinary range of subjects—from, say, an aristocratic tale of 19th-century French stoicism and sexuality (“Bark”) to the story of a married British military pensioner who falls in love—depending on how you define that—with the London prostitute he sees once a year (“Hygiene”). The approaching death of a great modern composer—on personal terms with Stravinsky and Ralph Vaughn Williams—is every bit as incisive, observant, and moving in its way (“The Silence”) as is the tale of long-ago Sweden and a 23-year love affair that goes unconsummated, unrecognized, and, in the end, pathetically misunderstood (“The Story of Mats Israelson”). Stories that might be merely topical or trendy in lesser hands bear real fruit in Barnes’s, as witness “Appetite,” a tale about the ravages of Alzheimer’s that never comes even close to the dread magazine-article tone that so often haunts and diminishes such efforts; or “The Fruit Cage,” the genuinely compelling story of an aging woman (her grown son narrates) who may indeed actually be a physical abuser of her husband. Even prospectively lesser material can grow authoritative and large with Barnes’s treatment—like his look at hair-cutting then and now (“A Short History of Hairdressing”), or his one-act-playlike portrayal of two widows, each thinking she has the goods on the other (“The Things You Know”). Most moving of all may be “Knowing French,” made up of letters written by an octogenarian to “Mr. Novelist Barnes.” The writer is living in an old folks’ home (an “Old Folkery”), but she demonstrates such brio, pizzazz, introspection, and natural learnedness—all as she’s about to die—that no reader can help but love her.
Fine stories, well rounded and grounded. Six of the eleven have appeared in The New Yorker.Pub Date: July 9, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4214-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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