A first collection of 13 quirky and occasionally fabulistic stories by the author of the complex brainteasing first novel Hallucinating Foucault (1996, not reviewed). Several pieces, including the lyrical title story, are only vignettes: glimpses of islands of calm (such as those “lemon trees”) standing aloof from the contemporary social muddle, or, more pointedly, expressing the polarities of male (conquest and exploitation) vs. female (escape or retaliation). “This is the way we see things,” explains a character in “The Crew of M6” (about documentary filmmakers who unwisely focus on a lesbian community), “there is a state of war, undeclared war, between men and women.” These briskly confrontational, aphorism-studded tales are, accordingly, dispatches from the front—including a flimsy piece about a feminist lecturer who rescues a bird from her cat’s clutches (“Gramsci and the Sparrow”), a woman’s surreally violent farewell to her condescending husband (“The Glass Porch”), and an erotic monologue (“The Woman Alone”) that’s also a declaration of primal female sexual power. The gender emphasis grows wearying, but Duncker’s best stories playfully vary the mix. “The Storm,” for example, a Kafkaesque parable set in an otherworldly “College,” recounts the tug of wills between an authoritarian Master and the callow author of an impertinent iconoclastic Book, whom the Master recognizes as —one tiny fragment of pure freedom that had defeated us.” And Duncker’s finest piece, the novella-length “The Arrival Matters,” offers (in addition to its witty title) a teasing revision of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: A small girl named Miranda is raised on a Caribbean island among a society of women, under the watchful eye of an ironical mother-figure who seems herself torn between the opposing claims of the (ordinarily) battling sexes. Potentially monotonous fiction redeemed by its author’s phrasemaking skill and inventive power. Duncker can get under your skin, but she’s an original and she’s worth reading.
Pub Date: April 27, 1998
ISBN: 0-88001-604-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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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