A strong debut despite its unevenness.
Michel, an editor at Gigantic and Electric Literature, makes his fiction debut with a collection of stories—all restrained, all strange.
In this book, you get 25 stories in 216 pages—not a bad deal. Michel opens with “Our Education,” which has this offhanded mention on its second page: “There is an ongoing fire in the back corner of the cafeteria.” The surrealism is introduced without any underlining, setting the tone for not only this story, but for the book as a whole. Soon, it becomes clear that the teachers have vanished, but Michel is interested in mystery, not answers. The word “elliptical” was invented for tales like these, most of which are set in mundane suburban spaces in which people “feel detached from their surroundings.” Some of the stories are remarkable—and no surprise, they tend to be the longer ones: “Some Notes on My Brother’s Brief Travels” leaves an impression with its dancing man dressed like a chicken, an image both absurd and lonely. “Things Left Outside” feels like an update of Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home,” with violence creeping into domesticity. “Halfway Home to Somewhere Else,” the best story here, involves a grown man’s conflicts with a group of teenagers at a swimming hole. Michel knows the right authors to mimic, and his stories take cues from Barthelme and Aimee Bender in addition to Carver…but then, what stories by an emerging writer don’t these days? For all the book’s quirkiness, the cumulative effect is somewhat familiar, like a piece of boxy IKEA furniture anyone can build as long as they follow the instructions, and too many of Michel’s shorter pieces are forgettable, lacking enough substance to become truly haunting; they feel as lightweight as paper airplanes, taken away by the wind before reaching any destination.
A strong debut despite its unevenness.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-56689-418-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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