She’s got what it takes and she knows how to use it.
Twelve stories of invitations and departures and life changes, often unexpected or unwanted.
Milliken’s debut gets off to a bang with “A Matter of Time,” in which the wife of a struggling actor throws a rather desperate dinner party for her husband’s much more successful friend, who has already failed to show up for two prior invitations, in the ever dwindling hope that he will help his old buddy get an audition. Almost everything that could go wrong does—the front door falls off its hinges, the play date they’ve arranged for their kindergartener, Caroline, is cancelled; and, unbelievably enough, this time the guest of honor shows up so early the hostess hasn’t even had a chance to put on her makeup. Half the stories in the collection fan out from this one, with Caroline appearing as a character in five of them. In a second excellent party story, “The Whole World,” we return to the dilapidated little house to celebrate Caroline’s 16th birthday, during which she receives a used, teal-green Honda as a gift from her dad. In “Detour,” set four years later, she has driven across the country with a girlfriend who may or may not be her lover. Another character in this cycle is a hand model named Bill, a friend of Caroline’s dad; in “Parts of a Boat” we go with him to a claustrophobic dinner party at sea. The interesting and unexpected connections between the characters in the linked stories create a strong sense of plot and a distinct fictional world; on the downside, it makes the stories that aren’t part of the group feel a little distracting.
She’s got what it takes and she knows how to use it.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60938-201-8
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
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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