No one captures the charm of having money and using it with offhand splendor the way Auchincloss does.
An excellent collection of 12 previously unpublished stories display the author’s usual precision and ease, wit and moral scrupulousness.
The group Auchincloss (Writers and Personality, 2005, etc.) makes his own are American families of inherited wealth and power. In the stories presented here, it is in measuring the precise oscillations between the limitless possibilities afforded by wealth, and the limits imposed by its possession, that the author excels. The title story, set just before the outbreak of World War I, concerns Lionel Manning, a young man, gifted and much beloved, of perfect tact and artistic discernment. In letters addressed to a biographer chosen by the young man’s father, artistic friends his senior by a generation posthumously offer their praise and gratitude. Manning guided their careers, serving as model and mentor, insuring their success and considerable fame. The irony, as Auchincloss puts it so delicately, is that “Lion was one who could inspire genius without being one.” So rich is the life cut short that the inability of the story's hero to follow those whom he had boosted up Parnassus has no real sting. So thoroughly has he lived in the artistic lives of others that his failure never occurs to us, until Auchincloss chooses the perfect moment to disclose it. An even better story is “A Case History,” which traces the choices made by Marvin Daly, heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, struggling after the World War II with what he takes to be the moral implications of his own homosexuality; of Marvin, the author writes: “[Marvin’s] moderate good looks, his moderate competence in sports, and his moderate good nature caused him to be moderately accepted.” The flawless accuracy of observation displayed by Auchincloss makes this one a little masterpiece.
No one captures the charm of having money and using it with offhand splendor the way Auchincloss does.Pub Date: April 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-55115-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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