The McIlvoyian insight and charm return, full force.
The 12 shorter tales here lack the life-force and zest of McIlvoy’s splendid Hyssop (1998), but the title novella provides plenty.
The stories often feel not of a piece tonally, as though they rose from old desk drawers. From flawlessly poetic hymns to a chain letter symbolizing life (“Chain”) and to the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi (“Been So Good to Me”), McIlvoy declines to the mechanical, as in the psychologically thin “Ice” (a nurse “accidentally” blinds an eye to keep a boy out of Vietnam). Poverty can seem at once authentic and too conscious of itself as an engine in pieces like “Smoke” (an uninsured working family’s house burns); “Permission” (about an old magician who long ago performed in jazz saloons); or “Rafters” (the working-class boy from “Smoke” forms an affection for the yet-lower-class, Snopes-like, side of his mother’s family). Everything changes, though, in the novella, made up of three 1965–66 term papers written by the ineffably charming Charlemagne (“Chum”) J. Belter for his teacher, Mrs. Dorothy Bettersen, the first paper in the fifth grade, the second in summer school (he failed fifth!), the third in sixth. Each one comes complete with Mrs. Bettersen’s comments and grade, Chum’s hilarious outline, the “paper” itself, and endnotes that will baffle, please, and amuse in equal measure. As for story, like the title says, there’s completely everything, all the real history mixed in with Chum’s own voice (“maybe there weren’t commas in those days,” he cites his father, and tells us later that “When there was first canned food in New Mexico was when people found God again”). But there’s even more: the death of Chum’s best friend, Daniel, and the disappearance of Daniel’s sister, Marty. By the end of the search for Marty, the reader will not only be moved indeed but will know much more about everything and everyone, including Mrs. Bettersen.
The McIlvoyian insight and charm return, full force.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55597-413-9
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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