Poignant, exquisite, and endlessly witty.
Upton’s (The Tao of Humiliation, 2014, etc.) latest collection comprises stories inhabited by characters entangled in either classic literature or their own convoluted tales.
In “A Shadow,” a maid discovers a piece of metal in J.M. Barrie’s sitting room on the morning of the author’s death. The item eventually finds its way to a boy, who’s haunted by an unrelenting shadow in his dreams, demanding he cut off a pirate’s hands. Well-known literary works play a significant role here, and Upton rarely disguises the source of inspiration. In “The Odyssey,” for example, 11-year-old, home-schooled Tahreen stumbles upon a man’s still-breathing body on the beach, like Nausicaä in Homer’s poem. Such references aren’t just dropped and forgotten. Tahreen, years later, judges her online-set dates based on each man’s response to her oft-told man-on-the-beach account. Upton sometimes makes broader bookish connections. The narrator of “Night Walkers,” for example—developing a distaste for reading after her husband leaves her for a writer/librarian—joins a book club since most members don’t actually discuss the books. Hints of fairy tales help shape the characters: the sudden appearance of apples makes an apparently meek elderly woman in “Ambrosia” seem sinister; in “Visitation,” Tiffany’s mother, wanting a bouquet for her daughter, may follow a flower-destroying groundhog down a hole. “Hello! I Am Saying Hello! Because That Is What I Do When I Say Hello!” is a standout, and not just for its title. In it, Natalie, who famously ruins things, like her cousin’s restaurant, questions why her friend Anita would ever ask her to be maid of honor. Upton, a published poet, infuses her narrative with lyrical details. A cynical Natalie believes her friend “had undone her marriage deliberately but carefully, the way a good tailor might rip out a seam without harming delicate fabric.”
Poignant, exquisite, and endlessly witty.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8071-6812-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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