With an ability to tweeze meaning from the effluvia of the everyday, Knight spins magic out of nothing much. Tremendous.
Mellow scenes from a multitude of lives in repose.
Some writers, perhaps as a defense, write about not much in particular: they don’t have much of anything to say and so retreat to the safety of the meaningless short story, with no end, no beginning and very little of substance in between. Knight could be mistaken for one of these at first, as his characters tend to be trivial and spend their lives idly, but from the first pages of this second collection (after Dogfight, 1998), it’s clear that he is simply a great writer who doesn’t have anything to prove. In the glorious “Birdland,” he imagines the tiny burg of Elbow, Arkansas, where the narrator lives in his grandmother’s house, whiling away the days between Alabama football games, which she watches with the town’s entire population on the TV in the general store. The narrator romances The Blonde, a Yankee ornithologist who’s in town to study the parrots from New England that winter in Elbow and who is endlessly fascinated by the southern time warp she calls home. By the end, the two are fully in love and gloriously relaxed: “My life purls drowsily out behind me like water. Parrots preen invisibly in the dark.” In the misfit epic “Ellen’s Book,” another low-expectation narrator, Keith, is in love, but unrequited. His wife, Ellen, has left him after their child was still-born, and now he stalks her from afar, developing a strange camaraderie with her father, Wade, who treats Keith with a mixture of contempt and affection. Keith’s a writer, but the only story he ever published was one that Ellen rewrote and he submitted by mistake: “I wanted her to know that half a talent was the worst thing in the world. That sort of ordinary can’t help but break your heart.”
With an ability to tweeze meaning from the effluvia of the everyday, Knight spins magic out of nothing much. Tremendous.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-867-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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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