A collection beginning with consistently engaging essays loses its footing in the dreary fiction that follows, bringing Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Kumin's (In Deep, 1987, etc.) latest to a wobbly end. The poet in Kumin is fully evident in her essays. With florid, not fussy, prose and precise observation, she chronicles life on her New Hampshire farm, elevating jicama (``a delightfully crunchy root I first met on an hors d'oeuvres platter in Texas ten years ago'') to unforeseen heights and reaping life lessons from an adopted city mutt and spindle-legged fillies. She's both a student and a teacher, rapturously researching and relating details of the world: She compares half a dozen mushroom field guides in search of edible fungi and choice passages; readers will feel able to buy, train, and breed horses on finishing ``A Horse for Fun.'' Some essays are anecdotal (``Mutts'' is a comic dog tale); others are philosophical (``Have Saddle, Will Travel'' is about horseback riding possibilities on reading tours); still others resemble diary entries (``Labors of Love'' records foals' births in earthy prose). Her interest in the most mundane subjects (the squash leaves covering a dung heap), her compulsive devotion to nature (she sleeps alongside pregnant mares when their delivery dates approach), and her ability to translate life into language (should the dog's name scan as a trochee or a spondee?) are infectious. But the short stories are everything the essays are not: rushed, blunt, and vague. Dominated by domestic configurations—daughter meets young stepmom, hunter beds vegan, three generations of women welcome the fourth—their characters are bland and the telling dispassionate. Every point and meaning is stated—no room for reader imagination or inference here. The best stories are ``The Cassandra Effect,'' about a troubled graduate student, and ``Flotation Devices,'' in which three women are stranded while snorkeling. Antiseptic stories pale beside lush and verdant nonfiction: an unfortunate coupling.
Pub Date: July 25, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03655-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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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