Mogelson shows impressive range and restraint in an area—war-related fiction—in which physical and emotional extremes have...
U.S. veterans deal with the collateral damage of military service in this collection of often surprisingly understated stories.
An alcoholic veteran of the Afghanistan campaign is bailed out of jail by another vet who lost his legs (”To the Lake”). A vet’s broken marriage leaves his son with at least a bad physical scar, and the father eventually re-enlists (“Sea Bass”). A mother visits her veteran son in prison, eventually carrying there a box of letters he wrote to the father of the man he killed in a “drunken scrap” two months after being discharged (“Visitors”). Mogelson, who served in the National Guard without being deployed, spent almost three years as a freelance journalist in Afghanistan. The stories in this debut have the hard edge and sharp dialogue of well-observed reporting. In “A Human Cry," in which Mogelson draws a link between Army-supplied dentures and a death by farm mower, a brief scene captures a “big girl” in fishnet stockings, “little flesh diamonds pushing through the webbing like string-tied ham.” Like the mower, other common items—a chef’s knife, a car, a table saw—can cause mayhem stateside for the vet accustomed to military weapons. Only one story (“Kids”) is fully engaged in combat, and it hangs on whether the action of a local boy is meant to warn or harm U.S. soldiers. All the stories rely on some measure of ambiguity and indirectness (unlike the hammering anti-war irony of the e.e. cummings poem from which the book’s title is drawn). The fallout from PTSD may be everywhere, but the term and discussions thereon are MIA—and the stories as a result are broader and better.
Mogelson shows impressive range and restraint in an area—war-related fiction—in which physical and emotional extremes have been too readily deployed and exploited.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90681-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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