Taken individually, most of the stories are too wispy to be memorable. Still, together they form a quick, seamless arc that...
Another woman hooks up with all the wrong men, in linked stories from a fresh new voice.
Although the jacket copy would have us believe that our protagonist, Abby Hillman, is a smart woman who just chooses the wrong guys, there’s little in the collection to prove she’s anything but average. But it’s Rosenfeld’s decision to make her so—as opposed to the more common diamond-in-the-rough type—that lends interest to this intermittently impressive volume. In the first story, “Good for the Frog,” Abby talks about her last bad relationship, doing so with her long-distance friends Sarah and Jasper. She’s a needy mess but manages to slip in a good deal of self-deprecating asides. That story doesn’t prepare us for the body of “What About the Love Part?,” however, where we discover that Abby isn’t just clueless about love, but she’s got a child, Katrin, with an ex-husband and seems to be drifting slowly into a numbed loneliness. The most painful pieces take up her relationship with Stephen—a scathing caricature of a maddeningly self-involved itinerant writer—and their seemingly interminable rafting trips in the West (white-water rapids play far too large a role here). By the close, Abby’s life has come to seem almost hopeless: friends drifting away, romantic prospects nil, she herself exhibiting increasingly neurotic and fretful behavior. While there is little of the redemption here that readers may look for in tales of hapless heroines, Rosenfeld nevertheless makes her character convincingly real, which may, after all, be the more important thing.
Taken individually, most of the stories are too wispy to be memorable. Still, together they form a quick, seamless arc that ends in graceful, lonely quietude.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-44823-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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