Uneven, but for two thirds of its length deeply felt and rewarding.
First collection by award-winning and much-anthologized Wisenberg.
This slender volume divides neatly into two sections unequal in both length and heft. The weaker second portion includes two reimagined fairy tales, a rather predictable reworking of the Expulsion from the Garden, a couple of technical exercises that read like workshop submissions, and “My Mother’s War,” a twice-anthologized story of intergenerational competition between mother-and-daughter artists. These pieces have the slight, disembodied feeling of university papers, airless and affectless. By contrast, the 14 tales in the first section, while not uniformly successful, have the intensity of something experienced firsthand. Taken as a unit, they tell the story of several generations in a family of well-to-do bubble-bath manufacturers, the Rubins, and their place in the unlikely Jewish community of Houston. The pieces swirl through the lives of mother and father, Ruth and Ruben, and daughters Ellen and Cecilia (called Ceci), with particular attention to Ruth and Ceci. They invoke the 1950s, ’70s, and ’90s with subtle touches and inerrant memory. Ceci (closely modeled on the author, one suspects) is the kid sister par excellence, entertaining Ellen’s many admirers and, in the charming title piece, even landing one of them in the teary aftermath of the Kent State killings. She runs through a checkered career as a journalist, a part-time waitress, and an ESL teacher. Similarly, Wisenberg runs through a variety of styles and tones in these 14 generally excellent short fictions, which merit expansion into a longer book.
Uneven, but for two thirds of its length deeply felt and rewarding.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8101-5108-1
Page Count: 168
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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