Bass makes his impassioned points through fiction that rarely resorts to polemics.
Geography forges character within the literary naturalist’s compelling rite-of-passage stories.
As an essayist, activist and writer of both short and long fiction, the prolific Bass (The Hermit’s Story, 2002, etc.) has long explored the interplay of mankind and the environment. Many of these stories concern young people on the cusp of finding themselves and discovering their place in nature’s big picture. In the opener, “Pagans,” the setting of a river despoiled by urban sludge becomes Paradise Lost for two high-school friends and the younger girl loved by at least one of them. “Her First Elk” has a similar geometry, as two older brothers help a girl dismember (related in graphic detail) the elk she has hunted. In “Titan,” the narrator remembers when he was 12, a budding conservationist, and the bonds of difference he had with his older brother, a conspicuous consumer. (Their parents are geologists, an occupation featured frequently in Bass’s stories.) “Fiber” pushes the identification between author and first-person narrator even farther, as the protagonist is a writer, activist and geologist who conjures an alternative life for himself as a criminal, while pondering the limits and possibilities of fiction and the necessity for radical action. In what could stand as Bass’s artistic credo, the narrator says, “I am trying to let the land tell me who and what I am—trying to let it pace and direct me, until it is as if I have become part of it.” The title story is the longest and richest, an almost magical tale of a woman—the now-grownup girl in “Her First Elk”—struggling with cancer and the unlikely friendship she establishes with two children from a hardworking, fundamentalist-Christian family. It reads like a spiritual parable and proceeds to a resolution so bleak it could break the reader’s heart.
Bass makes his impassioned points through fiction that rarely resorts to polemics.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-59674-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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