Ravenel stretches her sense of southernness so far in this volume of 18 stories that even some of the contributors wonder what they're doing here, as a few comment in afterwords to their pieces. The strongest tales (by Edward Jones, Jill McCorkle, Peter Taylor, Wendell Berry, Pinckney Benedict, and David Huddle) have all appeared in recent collections and been reviewed (in most cases, favorably) by Kirkus. An excerpt from Robert Olen Butler's prize-winning book also shows up, making this volume a sampler of the year's best collections. The remaining 11 stories are a mixed bag, with tales of love and relationships dominating. Tony Earley's ``Charlotte'' links the narrator's failed romance to the disappearance of professional wrestling in his North Carolilna hometown. Equally quirky, Dan Leone's ``Spinach,'' set in the ``Spinach Capital of the World'' (Alma, Arkansas), finds two men abandoning the same woman for lives as desert bums. Dennis Loy Johnson's ``Rescuing Ed,'' set near Little Rock, chronicles another relationship in turmoil—the narrator's partner in the contracting business has a hard time holding on to his artsy wife. The hip, modern South also shows up in Kevin Calder's ``Name Me This River,'' about a young, self-dramatizing girl from Atlanta. Annette Sanford's ``Helens and Roses,'' about a couple in a Texas trailer- park who've been married for 50 years, testifies to the endurance of jealousy. But Paula Gover's ``White Boys and River Girls,'' Georgia-set, is the real find here—a pitch-perfect tale of mismatched lovers. The unequivocal love between parents and children makes for three compelling pieces: Richard Bausch's narrative of an aging father who feels helpless; Elizabeth Hunnewell's sweet memory of a stepfather; and Lee Merrill Byrd's tear-jerking tale about a family altered forever by a fire. Wayne Karlin's haunting ``Prisoners'' provides a much-needed historical sense to this otherwise free-floating collection. Despite its shortcomings, still maybe the best annual story anthology around.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-56512-053-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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