A novella and five stories by a stylist who takes to a fare- thee-well Virginia Woolf's idea that women deserve their own sort of sentence and subject matter—those that don't march to a male rhythm—and their own moody, subliminal subject matter. In the surreal expressionism of Trueblood's debut collection, sense does indeed go up into vapor, sometimes. But this is the kind of crosswired writing that at the very least leads to somewhere new and never rolls dully down the groove of good sensible storytelling in little sermonizing sentences. The standout is the 100-page title piece, whose notably clearer style puts to shame the remaining lesser stories, which morph awkwardly like a batch of polliwogs into would-be frog princes. Jessie, 20 and pregnant, finds that her lesbian mother has been fibbing to her for all of her life: Her father didn't die in battle before Jessie was born. Instead, she's the product of artificial insemination by a med student sperm-donor who received the grand sum of 40 dollars for his bodily fluid. Jessie quickly spots her father in a class yearbook, tracks him down, breaks into his summer cabin, and lives there for a week on her own. Then she phones him, without revealing her identity, and gets an appointment to have her pregnancy checked over. Meanwhile, Nigel, the 40-year-old who got Jessie with child and then split, comes to visit her mom at the motel she manages and tries to straighten things out—in a scene that erupts with wisdom about who is responsible for what in a pregnancy. The climax is the snappish dialogue visited by Jessie upon her surprised biological father. As for the shorter stories, they show family life geysering in images summoned from the collective unconscious. Synaesthetic prose, all roses crushed with daisies, and not for the fainthearted.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57962-006-X
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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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