Although relatively simple in narrative structure, Griner’s stories shine a glaring light on the complexities of human...
Twenty-two stories ranging in length from a few paragraphs to 20 or so pages and in style from the freakishly absurd to the heartbreakingly realistic.
Griner excels in his longer stories, one of which—“On Board the SS Irresponsible”—borders on being a masterpiece. A father, Buddy (the narrator), comes to pick up his three children for a day’s adventure. His former wife, Clare, has custody, so this is a special time for the dad, and he wants to make it special for his children as well. They go out and, somewhat to the chagrin of the kids, do not much of anything—paint SS Irresponsible on the gunwale of his boat, picnic, and fish a little. These mundane activities are erased by a horrific tragedy that, at the end of the story, Buddy must explain to Clare. With great subtlety, Griner captures every nuance of Buddy’s emotional life, from his resentment of Clare to his awkward love for his children to his understandable dread of facing his own moral failure. Another realistic story is “Newbie Was Here,” which takes place among soldiers in Iraq. A private, the newbie of the title, is charged with going across some dangerous territory to milk a cow and bring back the milk for the captain for no discernible reason—but, after all, this is the Army. On the other end of the fictional spectrum is “The Caricaturist’s Daughter,” a surreal little tale in which whatever a caricaturist draws becomes real—so when his young daughter gets overly snoopy, for example, he draws her with a “big nose, long and pointed, like a sharpened broomstick” to remind her not to stick her nose in what doesn’t concern her. She grows up to be a cartoonist and exacts a predictable revenge.
Although relatively simple in narrative structure, Griner’s stories shine a glaring light on the complexities of human personality and family relationships.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-936747-95-5
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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