Ten subdued, unusually well-written stories set in Montana and the New South, most featuring that American staple: the sensitive but emotionally blocked guy who feels closer to nature than to his fellow men. Bass (Platte River, 1994, etc.) writes in prose scraped clean of excess and has selected each story with obvious care. His collection begins evocatively with ``The History of Rodney''—two damaged white lovers live in a ghost town created when the Mississippi River switched channels—and then slips down a notch with ``Swamp Boy,'' a tale of childhood cruelty directed at an odd boy who turns out to be the narrator. The three subsequent stories, however, ``Fires,'' ``The Valley,'' and ``Antlers,'' weave a wry and magical portrait of a Montana community on the edge of the wilderness. ``Fires'' quickens the pulse with its portrait of an acclaimed female runner's visit for a summer of high-altitude training: the narrator's descriptions of his wonder at the runner's finely honed body and psyche smoulder with the fury of a brushfire. ``The Valley'' limns the rituals that hold this attenuated community together before its members soar into a moment of collective madness. And ``Antlers'' moves from the comedy of Halloween—when everyone wears deer or elk antlers—into terror as the narrator realizes the madness behind an obsessed bowhunter's polite smiles. Of the rest, only ``The Legend of Pig-Eye'' develops a similar power, though it suffers from belonging to the well-worn genre of boxer-in-training fiction. The problem throughout may be with Bass's main character—a Nick Adams of the '90s who's moved to the wilds to escape humanity's dangerous attachments. A few more deeply explored relationships would make a difference. Some gems, and the rest highly readable, if under-emoted: worth the effort.
Pub Date: June 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-71687-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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