Oria's fiction is tense and gripping; it's like the surprising and disconcerting sound that emerges from an instrument...
In this debut collection, Oria tests her characters’ definitions of nationality, gender and relationship status, their tenuous senses of belonging to a place and to others.
These are crisply told, biting tales about characters split in two because of country or love. Everything is up in the air for these people; they have no feelings of security or comfort or home. In the title story, a woman in a polyamorous relationship becomes jealous at the discovery of her girlfriend and boyfriend having sex without her. She feels suddenly out of place. “There are two Me’s,” she says: the tough Israeli soldier and the woman trying to fit in in America, where “once a week she gets lost in the city on purpose, then walks—no maps, no questions—until she finds her way home.” In the unsettling and surreal “Victor, Changed Man,” Victor desperately tries to get the woman he loves to come back to him, but she literally disappears into a fog so catastrophic that the city’s “fog clearers were threatening to go on strike.” In the Cheever-esque “Beep,” a woman hears an infernal repetitive sound in her apartment, but no one else seems able to hear it. And in “My Wife in Converse,” Oria explores a newly legalized lesbian marriage—“Before my wife married me, she was married to a man”—which has already fallen apart, leaving the narrator lost and writing forlorn poetry.
Oria's fiction is tense and gripping; it's like the surprising and disconcerting sound that emerges from an instrument played by a traditionally trained musician who's chosen to explore new territory.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-53457-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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