Serving recommendation: One story per sitting. The book may be savored longer that way.
Rage in all its ugly glory takes center stage in this delectable debut collection.
The characters populating the landscape of these nine stories exist mostly in a rarefied life of the mind—scholars, teachers, reviewers, artists—until some crisis forces them to focus their powers of observation on themselves. In “An Excitable Woman,” an academic has no idea what to do about his spiteful mother, who lives only for the pleasure of rejecting the approaches of her “big-shot professor son.” The protagonist of “Samantha,” a black student full of a “surging, corrosive indignation,” is spoiling for a fight with anyone at her predominantly white college—the audio-visual department assistant, a minority affairs counselor, the bookstore cashier—until a brief encounter with a professor yields some surprises, not least of which is her own response. A music aficionado, awed by a fellow audience member (“The Stranger”) who physically removes a whole row of disruptive teenagers from their seats at a Tanglewood concert, begins to stalk the man until he finds himself engaged in an even more violent act. In “The Visit,” an up-and-coming poetry critic meets Robert Lowell and his wife, Lady Caroline, in their trashed bedroom at the Gramercy Hotel in a set piece that is part Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, part “Beavis and Butthead.” In “Secrets and Sons,” a magazine editor and long-time friend to a dying poet is forced to come to terms with his competitive hatred for the poet’s uneducated gay ward when he is upstaged at the funeral by voluminous evidence that he knew only one small part of the man’s life. Boyers’s stories about academics and art-lovers who hide their more ignoble characteristics until life inevitably draws them out is exquisitely crafted and acutely observed.
Serving recommendation: One story per sitting. The book may be savored longer that way.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-885586-40-X
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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