Stories, like their heroine, so brave and full of life that obvious flaws—lapses in logic; tendencies to jump off romantic...
Novelist and short-story writer Pritchard (Selene of the Spirits, 1998, etc.) links eight tales in the life of her slightly off-kilter, often misguided but always-intriguing heroine.
In “Port de Bras,” Eleanor is an awkward 12-year-old goody-goody whose friend Donna Rae is working-class and wild. Donna Rae’s downfall sets Eleanor’s course, awakening her sexuality. “Salve Regina” (a 2000 O’Henry winner) finds Eleanor in a Catholic high school where her devotion to the Virgin Mary combines with her crush on a nun. After her newest wild friend dies in a motorcycle crash on her way to an abortion, Eleanor drops Catholicism and finds her good looks. But beauty doesn’t bring enlightenment. By “The Case of the Disappearing Ingénue,” Nora suspects her first husband of cheating and compensates by spying, with embarrassing results, on a local horse-owner she suspects of murder. In “High Fidelity,” she’s a successful romance writer and rather glamorous twice-divorced mother of two. Coming home with her newest male conquest, she realizes that her daughters are the “truest romances of her life”—a motherly declaration readers should doubt. The next story, “The Widow’s Poet,” mentions the girls only fleetingly as grown, while Nora, a mere 48, is already a widow after a long, childless third marriage. Having evolved from romance writing to poetry, Nora lets her obsession with a young student take over her life in humiliating ways. “Her Last Man” uses a more aggressive, free-form style as Nora nurses her dying father, her first passion. In “Funktionslust,” a Pushcart-winner, Nora has become Eleanor again, working a dead-end job and hiding a gorilla in her garage for an ecoterrorist friend—until, in a final leap of faith, she and the animal off, Thelma-and-Louise style.
Stories, like their heroine, so brave and full of life that obvious flaws—lapses in logic; tendencies to jump off romantic cliffs—are forgivable.Pub Date: May 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50303-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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