The cigarette analogy of “Smoke-Long Stories” would seem to apply—if you smoke a pack straight through, few will be...
The title of this collection of very short stories is its most provocative element.
The publisher calls this book "Flash Fiction," which is described as “the love child of Narrative and Meth Amphetamine.” The foreword proceeds to offer other names for this kind of fiction, saying that “the most charming sobriquet comes from China: Smoke-Long Stories. A narrative that can be read in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.” More than 50 stories fit within little more than 100 pages, and they range in length from one paragraph to a couple of pages. They rarely relate to each other, except for two consecutive stories, “Homage” and "Eat at the Downingtown Diner Located Conveniently in Downtown Downingtown," which mention Steve McQueen and seem more like one story. The author's previous books are mostly poetry collections and novels for teenagers (The Ogre’s Wife, 2013, etc.). Here, he draws from classic mythology, Lois Lane’s diary, exchanges between students and schoolteachers, and reflections on the nature of storytelling. Among the more memorable are “University of the Dark," in which the afterlife is an eternal library (“There are a lot worse things than being dead”), and “Principles of Handicapping,” which applies the horse-racing model to, say, “a filly named Teen Age Temptress [who] prefers weekends to weekdays. Past performances show that she tends to sulk and toss her rider on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.” “Money and a Room of One’s Own” concerns a plan to start a small publishing house dedicated to the “marginalized and unappreciated.”
The cigarette analogy of “Smoke-Long Stories” would seem to apply—if you smoke a pack straight through, few will be memorable, though perhaps rationing them to one at a time over a longer period will enhance the experience.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59709-544-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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