No matter the story, Rash grabs you and doesn’t let go.
It’s grand to see a writer coming into his own, as Rash does in this punchy story collection, following some impressive novels (The World Made Straight, 2006, etc.).
Once again, we’re in the mountains of North Carolina, where life is hard and the locals age fast. In the extraordinary “Pemberton’s Bride,” set in the early-20th century, Pemberton returns to town with his bride. Waiting for him at the train station is a woman he has impregnated and her father, ready to kill her seducer. Knives flash. Pemberton quickly dispatches the old man; case closed. After all, he owns the lumber company, the only large-scale business in town. The icy, imperious couple dominates the community like royalty, until they overreach with a double murder. This long story, a natural for the big screen, chills to the bone. Some contemporary stories, though not in that league, are also powerful. In “Deep Gap,” a father, helpless against the spread of drugs into country towns, tries desperately to save his son from his habit, and the brutal dealers he can’t pay. “Dangerous Love” features a carnival knife-thrower and his partner; they fall in love. What makes their love dangerous is the intensity of their passion. “The Projectionist’s Wife” is a dramatic coming-of-age story; a 14-year-old boy saves a woman from a questionable tryst and kills his first deer, both within an hour. Violence is seldom far away. A college teacher, responding to a personal ad, is brought up short when the woman tells him her husband is set to kill her once he gets out of prison (“Honesty”). A daredevil teenager, stealing marijuana, gets caught in a bear trap (“Speckled Trout,” the basis for The World Made Straight). A charming exception is “Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes,” in which three old geezers get a new lease on life when they take on a giant sturgeon.
No matter the story, Rash grabs you and doesn’t let go.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-42508-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
