Riveting if polemical, and mostly bleak, depictions of America.
Bender, whose last book of stories (Refund, 2015, etc.) was a National Book Award finalist, generally uses world events as the background for fiction focused on domestic life, but these 11 stories make our current sociopolitical landscape the subject.
“Where To Hide in a Synagogue” sets the volume’s demoralized tone; while discussing with a friend how to protect their congregation from attack, a woman realizes their relationship won’t survive their disagreement over whom to trust or fear. Fear, along with anger and guilt, defines all the female, mostly Jewish characters here. Years after a woman is sexually assaulted in “The Elevator,” the trauma affects her behavior in another elevator. The protagonist’s financial panic underlies “Three Interviews” as she loses three job offers by inadvertently heightening the secret fears (maternal, romantic, medical) of her interviewers. Hidden hurts and fears push ultraconservative “Mrs. America” to campaign for the Senate whatever the moral and psychological cost. In “This Is Who You Are,” a teenager in 1974 struggles with both her Jewish identity and guilt over ostracizing a friend misused by a predatory teacher. The title story knots guilt and fear even more tightly as two contemporary middle-aged women admit the very different guilt each has carried since a deadly shooting at their 1970s middle school. While these stories explore relationships along with issues, “The Department of Happiness and Reimbursement” abandons domestic realism, imagining a near future in which all jobs are government controlled, walled compounds house the unemployed, and a “national game show” awards contestants abandoned mansions. Liberal condescension mars “On a Scale of One To Ten,” about nonobservant Jews who briefly consider enrolling their child in a Christian school before rejecting “Jesus’s desire to love us.” The closing story, “The Cell Phones,” about a Rosh Hashanah service interrupted by needy callers, offers a tiny sliver of optimism for those willing to listen to each other.
Riveting if polemical, and mostly bleak, depictions of America.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-099-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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