The second decade of this fine series begins with a real coup- -a story by the King of Southern culture himself: no, not Elvis, but William Faulkner, a previously unpublished story rediscovered by the editor of The Oxford American, itself a bright new addition to the literary scene down home. Ravenel continues to scour magazines big and small for the best by and about the South. It's no great shame that most of her selections pale besides the Master. And Faulkner's ``Rose of Lebanon'' definitely belongs in his canon: A true daughter of the Confederacy—no flighty southern belle—reenacts her vulgar taunts to Yankee marauders years later at a sedate Memphis dinner party. Diminished in comparison are a number of light pieces: J.D. Dolan's ``Mood Music,'' a tale of sunburns and sexual tension in a nuclear family; David Gilbert's ``Cool Moss,'' a satiric look at coal- walking and the failure of positive thinking; and Tim Gautreaux's ``Died and Gone to Vegas,'' a compendium of tall-tales told by Louisiana oil workers. Tom Paine's ``General Markham's Last Stand,'' in which a retiring general humiliates himself in public, is simply unconvincing, but some familiar voices sound loud and strong here. Lee Smith's pointed tale of a retirement home's writing group, ``The Happy Memories Club,'' goes straight to the heart of the fictive enterprise itself. Jill McCorkle's ``Paradise,'' with its contemporary Eve, a southern Baptist girl, and her boyfriend, Adam, a Jewish northerner, gives opportunity for her vintage low humor, with its droll portrait of middle-class vulgarity. Moira Crone's ``Gauguin'' is a fractured advertisement for quirky Louisiana. Particularly haunting are Robert Olen Butler's `` Twilight Zone''-ish fable about a husband reincarnated as a parrot in his wife's home; Ellen Douglas's old-timey account of an old man's death; and Annette Sanford's portrait of a slightly retarded girl who's smarter than her relatives realize. An estimable volume in an estimable—and getting on toward the venerable—series.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1996
ISBN: 1-56512-155-4
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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