Novelist Wieland’s second collection (Discovering America, 1993) comprises nine long, earnest, sometimes elegant stories that, unfortunately, keep the reader at a distance. In the novella-length title piece, a young man dying of AIDS meets the father who abandoned him as a baby. They bond to some extent, and the father teaches the son to drive. With all these stories the point of view, time, and voice shift frequently, and the digressions are plentiful, ranging from insightful to annoying. The most interesting tale is “Purgatory,” where a senile father tells some terrible truths about parenting to his willful, bitchy daughter, who is determined to become a parent. In “Salt Lake,” when a woman’s mother dies, she discovers that the man she thought was her uncle is really her father. “Irradiation” depicts a woman who stays in touch with the disturbed teenaged girl who caused her husband’s death. Several stories are also very melancholy in tone, as evidenced by this passage from “The Loop, The Snow, Their Daughters, The Rain—: “Each wondered, privately, why the whole world did not fall apart, did not drown in tears like this, sadness that could never be soothed, only diminished for a time by a cocktail, an in-flight movie, distance, time, speed, weather.” The prose in the complicated and deeply sad “Gray’s Anatomy” has echoes of Conrad. Three elderly men meet in an emergency ward, each accompanied by a sick or injured child. When one of the children dies, her father ponders, “We ought to have traded places, her damaged body for my good one. Hers that was not big enough to heal itself, for mine that was so large and empty on the inside, and like all bodies, so utterly dark and unknowable.” Filled with extended passages of delicate and poetic language, but the pleasure quotient is low.
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-87074-441-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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