Ford's stories can be individually striking, but corralling them lessens the effect: they seem like the same story done over. A man remembers back to the unhappy, inarticulate lives of his Northwestern parents—and finds himself dumbfounded by the melancholy, stoic gravity of living. Or else the same man participates in unsavory rites (illegalities, adulteries) that lead him to be dumbfounded by the melancholy, stoic gravity of living. (It more often than not hits him while fishing.) Many stories here seem like three Raymond Carver stories stitched together, but Ford can never find the shut-off valve before delivering himself of some vague, portentous piety or other: "What we did, I thought, didn't matter so much. Not to us, or to anyone. . . It was the same, and we were all the same then. She was pushing everything out in order to distinguish the world. It's no worse or better than other ways." Lawbreaking here is in constant touch with stalemate, someone always dragging along a past that's checkered at best; and in style, Ford's mannerism of the self. consciously hard. boiled comes off as a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." But two stories are quite fine here: "Empire"—a classically muzzy liaison on a train, where tawdriness seems less the point than grace; and "Optimists"—true, awful violence is set into the trivial contexts where it really does occur and which it's unable to transcend. Ford's grim meandering serves these best—and makes them the standouts in an otherwise unexceptional collection.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1987
ISBN: 0802144578
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
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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