Thirteen winning stories by western author Fromm (Blood Knot, 1998, etc.), who trades more on character than on locale in this, his sixth book. Although most of the people in these pages have spent their entire lives somewhere west of Laramie, they are all weighed down by an overwhelming gloom that seems to have migrated straight from Hawthorne’s New England. The narrator of the title story, for instance, is consumed with remorse over his senile mother’s long decline and freakish death (thinking it was summertime, she went swimming and froze in the snow). Not content to watch her fade away during her final years, he—d become a janitor so as to get a job at her nursing home and be close to her; now, with her dead, his life has no purpose. “The Raw Material of Ash” portrays the malaise of a young carpenter and his unhappy wife; once talented and ambitious, the husband now makes cheap cremation coffins for a funeral home and with stupefied regret faces the impending breakup of his marriage. In “Black Tie and Blue Jeans,” a middle-aged loser tries to rekindle his lost sense of hope when he meets a young woman who confesses she used to have a crush on him when she worked at his restaurant years before. “Cowbird” is a heartbreaking account of a childless couple who adopt a sickly infant, while “Doors” describes the domestic traumas engendered by a teenager’s pregnancy. The strangest tale here is “The Thatch Weave—: told from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy who refuses to face the reality of his infant sister’s imminent death, it has a haunting intensity that sets it apart. Vivid and sharp, written with a startling coolness that only serves to heighten the emotional forcefulness of the narratives themselves.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20936-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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