Stylistically rooted in the conventional, probing at the transgressive.
Eleven tales in a third collection from veteran small-press author Bingham (Straight Man, 1996, etc.)
The central theme here is expressed by the protagonist of “The Big Bed”: “Liz wanted, the summer she turned sixty-four, to pass through unconditional love . . . to what appeared to be its inevitable other side: transgression.” Transgression, for Liz, amounts to arranging a threesome for her wanderer-lover in the misguided hope that she can keep him. But that’s not the first one. The first transgression comes in “Apricots,” when an aging college instructor finds herself, by her own design, jamming fruit alongside one of her students, a young man with tanned hands who is quite familiar with the sexual nature of the scenario. In “Benjamin,” an aging painter, languorous in fame and conceit, attends the unveiling of a signature work and meets a young woman—another transgression—who will reveal both his weakness and what strength he has left. An aging momma’s boy’s (“Stanley”) failure to outgrow the social conventions of the schoolyard leads to awkwardness on a date (a failure to transgress), which in turn leads to a pathological fascination with the woman who seems, awfully, to be perfect for him. The final piece (“The Splinter”) is a quiet story about another older woman who finds herself alone with another young man, gay this time and in for the equivalent of a foot-washing ceremony and discussion of the fickleness of men and the fleeting nature of human relations. Other tales are about a woman who decides to leave an ill lover (“Rat”) and a husband who tells a wife about a long-lost love in a cave in Crete (“Loving”). Bingham’s career is in its fifth decade; perhaps this accounts for Liz’s conclusion that “For what, after all . . . is the use of age if it doesn’t bring us to courage?”
Stylistically rooted in the conventional, probing at the transgressive.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-889330-77-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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