Everything that Fitzgerald touches here, large or small, turns quietly to gold.
From the late, illustrious Fitzgerald (The Blue Flower, The Bookshop, both 1997, etc.), a volume of stories that will disappoint the great novelist’s readers only by the fact of its being so slender.
Not all eight of the pieces here are equally ambitious, but all rise to the standard of deftness, accuracy, and grace that marks them as Fitzgerald's, whether she's writing of the 17th century or the 20th. Or, for that matter, the 19th, as in the title (and first) story, about a rector's daughter in 1852 Australia whose one doomed chance at love (and escape) is with a fleeing convict. The fierceness of poverty and rank, and the stumbling beginnings of modern medicine in Istanbul near the start of the 20th century (“The Prescription”), are rendered with equally few and economical strokes; and in “Desideratus,” the same can be said also of rural England in the 17th century, as a boy from a poor household briefly meets high rank as he retrieves—in a most eerie way—a lost medal, given him as a gift. Among the most wonderful here are “Beehernz” (a music festival director in England tries to bring an ancient erstwhile conductor of Mahler back from an eccentric and isolated retirement); “The Red-Haired Girl” (an English art student learns about sympathy and failure—his own—on an 1882 painting trip to France; and “The Axe,” a perfectly toned description of a Bartleby-like figure though in a modern British corporation. A conflict in character may lead—well, to almost anything in “Not Shown,” about a country estate open to visitors, and about the administrative assistant there who wants to keep his own life intact. Less a story than extended anecdote, “At Hiruharama” nevertheless grips and enchants in its description of a 19th-century farm couple in remote New Zealand, and what happens when childbirth comes.
Everything that Fitzgerald touches here, large or small, turns quietly to gold.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-618-07994-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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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