In spite of periodic slumps into the hyper-familiar, stories from novelist Schumacher (The Body is Water, 1995) are also capable of ascending to the unusually intelligent, confident, and moving. Girlfriends in junior high find out—some—about the awe, mystery, and danger of sex when their new music teacher, Mr. Zinn, begins preying on one of them (``The Private Life of Robert Schumann''), and if the story's tone flirts with that of a girls' YA (12 and up), its ending and expertness in the telling rise much higher. The same is true of ``Levitation,'' a slumber-party story about glib-tongued girls picking on an ugly duckling—but with an ending that sips straight from the cup of the muse. ``Dummies''—two sisters and a retarded brother are taken in by an eccentric woman when their own mother is in the hospital—sure-footedly gains a momentum that fully earns its quietly philosophic ending (``Generally I have found that the future is useless. It doesn't help; at times it may as well not exist''). ``Dividing Madelyn'' is an amusing Eloise-like story of manners but not a deep one (a pre-puberty girl likes it better when her parents remain separate than when they reunite), while ``Infertility'' (about a childless couple) remains too cool to summon a reader's heart in spite of its mastery in detail. ``Rehoboth Beach,'' however, a summertime story of sisters coming of age (or failing to), sculpts entire lives and places without a misstep; ``Telling Uncle R'' does the same while winsomely scooping up big helpings of lost history; and the title story—a woman remembers her father—dares to present itself in a Q&A format and does so brilliantly. Tuning one moment into the frequency of Flannery O'Connor, another into that of J. D. Salinger, Schumacher nevertheless shows the rare true strength of a voice in fiction that could become its very own.
Pub Date: Jan. 31, 1997
ISBN: 1-56947-070-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
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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