A quick, pleasurable set of short stories that track the emotional and intellectual struggles of several young men.
Lenker’s debut story collection presents vignettes of relationships between friends, family, and significant others.
These stories straddle a border between an Everyman’s search for meaning and a highly specialized look at modern Americana. They sometimes feature a young, male protagonist named Simon, whose emotional distance and general dissolution funnel into his sharp, critical view of the world around him. It’s never made explicit whether it’s the same Simon across the different narratives, or extensions of the same ethos, but this lack of distinction works well in stories that slip easily between humor and darkness. In “Pro Wrestling,” for example, Simon and his girlfriend get into an argument that threatens the emotional strength of their relationship before attending a violent (semipro) wrestling match. Lenker’s other recurring protagonist shares his own first name—Korby—and some of Simon’s tendencies toward sharp analysis. The stories, from time to time, touch on the function of religion in their characters’ lives. The author highlights Christianity, a strong belief in God, and the power of prayer in “Everyone Has a Miranda Moment,” in which Korby receives a frantic call from his brother, Keegan, relating to his infant nephew’s dire health. Other stories more tangentially reference spiritual beliefs. The title story is the most harrowing, featuring an unnamed, third-person protagonist whose own perceived lack of remarkability leads him to consider ending his life on a friend’s balcony. Following “Medium Hero” is a single-page, flash-fiction piece, “Twitter Translator,” which, in spite of its cleverness, is disparate from the rest of the collection. “Two Red Rings” revisits Korby during a police traffic stop after he’s been speeding on the highway with a marijuana joint in hand, but what starts as a moment of panic winds up as an encouraging interaction between Korby and the officer as they connect over their mutual love for a particular musical instrument.
A quick, pleasurable set of short stories that track the emotional and intellectual struggles of several young men.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-68162-374-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Turner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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