In recent years, several important critics have suggested that Scottish author Mackay (The Artist’s Window, 1999, etc.) is...
The romantic, bizarre, and sometimes murderous underpinnings of seemingly drab suburban lives are deftly revealed in ten densely written tales..
Mackay’s distinctive trick of inhabiting multiple points of view in even comparatively brief compass gives her stories an arresting and wonderfully tangled texture, and her vivid confrontational style is richly seasoned by spectacularly acute and amusing sidelong observations (e.g., a neighborhood busybody is “a pillar or something smaller, such as a hassock, of a local evangelical church”; a tarty young woman’s bold countenance is like “a cat’s, who rubs up against your legs while knowing there is a dead bird behind the sofa”). The terrors of domesticity are memorably skewered in the edgy title piece, about an unwelcome relative’s return “home” from Hong Kong and the resumption of his poisonous effect on his brother’s family; “The Last Sand Dance,” in which a faded actress and a failed playwright compulsively erode the flimsy fabric of their loveless marriage; and especially “Barbarians,” a withering portrayal of a “serial adulterer” complacent in his own (fourth) marriage of convenience, casually exploiting all the children he produces and encounters. Larger “worlds” are explored in a savage lampoon of pompous aging-male bonding (“The Wilderness Club”); the tale of a lonely shopgirl victimized—and moved to vengeance—by a loathsome molester (“A Silver Summer”); and the superbly imagined “The Day of the Gecko,” which features a woman editor whose fixation on a Bruce Chatwin–like writer-traveler blossoms into a fever dream fantasy complete with wickedly funny allusions to Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana.
In recent years, several important critics have suggested that Scottish author Mackay (The Artist’s Window, 1999, etc.) is one of Great Britain’s, if not the world’s, best writers. This fifth brilliant and exciting collection shows us exactly why they think so.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55921-247-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
