Plenty here for Bausch fans to admire, but no startling breakthrough to attract a wider readership.
In his latest collection, Bausch (Peace, 2008, etc.) occasionally allows his stylistic command to be undermined by symbolic heavy-handedness.
Character is key for this veteran author of novels and short fiction. His protagonists are neither good nor bad but, as one of the better stories here puts it, “honest in [a] self-deluding way.” That story is “Byron the Lyron,” about a man whose deepest love is for his sickly, strong-willed, 84-year-old mother Georgia, whose impending death is far more devastating to him than to her. Compounding the devastation is Byron’s breakup with his boyfriend, who continues to sustain a relationship with Georgia; not until Byron is free of both can he come into his own. Bausch offers no heroes or villains here, just lives that in their essence resemble the ancient buildings in Rome (where Byron has moved), “with their long history, their beauty and complication, their tragedy and triumph, their songs and their sorrow.” Two stories (“Son and Heir,” “Something Is Out There”) make use of a power outage to throw characters into thematic darkness; another (“One Hour in the History of Love”) employs a cafe table that proves impossible to steady as a metaphor for the couples sitting at it. In the title piece, a woman on the verge of upending her family’s life finds it instead upended by circumstances beyond her control, though she comes to see them as connected: “[T]his day’s badness was the beginning of something more, an unfolding.” Love is a predominant concern throughout this collection, which raises the metaphysical ante with the closing story, “Sixty-five Million Years,” in which a priest finds his spiritual torpor shaken by the doubts of a troubled, precocious young stranger.
Plenty here for Bausch fans to admire, but no startling breakthrough to attract a wider readership.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26627-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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