Although some stories resonate more loudly than others, ultimately Selecky’s party is worth attending.
Selecky’s debut collection of 10 short stories contains almost all the right ingredients.
In a group of stories that explore the power of love, friendships, familial relationships and all of the emotions these entanglements elicit, Selecky delves beneath the surface to provide an honest and insightful glimpse into her characters’ lives and situations, which sometimes parallel our own. Often witty and poignant, each story can stand on its own and contains components both familiar and unique: a woman who discovers that her engaged best friend is having an affair as she deals with a drunken ex who’s just shown up at her door and is coping with a disastrous and very funny dinner party; a young girl desperate to break away from her ultrareligious father who ends up making out with a total stranger in the back of a bus as she travels back home; a woman who hopes to conceive with her husband during a weekend getaway only to end up doubting his fidelity and making love with a friend; and a young man who questions his own values and the actions of his wife and her friends when he witnesses a mother’s neglect of her young child. While women may identify more readily with the dynamics of each situation and the characters that inhabit each tale, most readers will appreciate the author’s simple and straightforward writing. A few narratives aren’t as interesting as others, and it takes effort to get through them, but given the strength of the overall collection of stories, this weakness is easy to overlook.
Although some stories resonate more loudly than others, ultimately Selecky’s party is worth attending.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01142-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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