Hard-boiled stories about the working class in rural New England that consist about half of standard tropes in the current let's-be-laconic genre and about half of a native energy that pulls them on. The details of construction work and farming are rendered with a satisfying and knowledgeable expertise in stories that often move along somewhat more banally in their psychology. The loosely shaped "The Mason" ends up more or less gratuitously with a man bedding his niece, and in "Bruno and Rachel," set on an expertly rendered dairy farm, a young wife runs away but finally rand equally inexplicably) returns. Animal sex and human sex are commonly made symbolically parallel, as in "A Pair of Bulls," in which a farmer's wife goes off to a near-certain dalliance with another man while the farmer stays home and applies medicine to an ailing, recently castrated steer. There are stories of drunkenness and hunting, as in "The Boon" (a boy is accidentally shot during deer hunting), and of loggers and isolation, as in "Cody's Story" (two loggers, wintering in a trailer in the wilderness, begin to fear for their mental stability and end up in bed together). Sometimes the stories are content with familiar imagery of doubt, anxiety, and loss (in the title story, two boys drown a litter of puppies in "the black water of the river on its way to the ocean"); and at other times merely with toughened old country yarns (a wily cattle trader, in "A Good Cow," makes a sick cow look frisky before a sale by putting five pounds of ice up her rectum). "In This Life" chronicles the life of an older brother whose face becomes scarred by burns, whose girlfriend drowns, and whose life spirals downward into a Snopes-of-New-England squalor and hopelessness, but with symbols and dialogue redolent of Beattie/Carver. In all, some genuine energies (and occasional beauties) pushing their way through much that's standard.
Pub Date: April 3, 1987
ISBN: 0805051201
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Vintage/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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