Essential reading for students of the modern American short story and some of the best work of a writer who is at the top of...
A benchmark collection of stories by Bass (All the Land to Hold Us, 2013, etc.), one of the most capable practitioners of the form at work today.
A story by Bass takes one of several forms. One is a delineation of loss, usually but not always lost love, by someone stumbling through it, usually but not always a middle-aged man. In another, a woman, just this side of young, moves toward freedom born of self-discovery—and in this, few male writers, Jim Harrison excepted, are much good at even guessing what that might mean. “She felt as if she were younger,” one of Bass’ protagonists thinks, “going back to a place, some place she had not been in a long time but could remember fondly. It felt like she was in love.” Constrained by place, religion, circumstance, there are young people who shape their own worlds under the noses of grown-ups: says one Mormon girl of the secret life of an elder, “I’m not supposed to know that…I’m the only one who knows.” If it’s a Bass story, there’s usually a hawk afloat in the sky or dogs running around—“Texas hounds,” for instance, “that I’d brought up north with me a few years before.” Long associated with both the Deep South and the mountainous West, Bass writes movingly of the land, weather, and place as well—even when the place isn’t always attractive, such as the dark edges of little Western towns, “strange seams of disintegrating roughness on the perimeters.” All of these elements come to the fore in the 100-odd pages of new stories that close the book, all wind-swept plains and grim forests, mountain lions, badly loved girls, and wondrous resolutions—for one, that “there is no end, and we all deserve everything our hearts desire.”
Essential reading for students of the modern American short story and some of the best work of a writer who is at the top of his game.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-38115-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
PROFILES
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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