Literary fiction old and new from one of the contemporary masters of the form.
Much of this collection has been selected from previous works, including stories from The Knife Thrower (1998) and The Barnum Museum (1990). Settings range from the contemporary to the indefinite to the historic. “A Protest Against the Sun” is modern enough to feature a character in Goth-like dress and a teenage protagonist so introspective and sophisticated as to seem coequal to her parents. Conversely, “Eisenheim the Illusionist” is set “when the Empire of the Hapsburgs was nearing the end of its long dissolution.” Millhauser’s latest work opens the book. In the first new story, “The Slap,” readers enter a bucolic suburban community where a nameless man has begun to slap people at random. Clad in a bland trench coat, the man may be striking out against self-absorption and self-satisfaction, or he simply may be unstable. He slaps. And then he stops. Readers are left to dream why. The second new story is “The White Glove”: Emily and Will, teenage partners in a deep platonic but not yet romantic relationship, are confronted by an odd disease that ends with Emily covering her hand with a white glove. Like much of Millhauser’s work, "The White Glove" touches upon the surrealistic and resonates with metaphors and allegories. A shorter piece is “Getting Closer,” six pages of exposition delving into a youngster’s reluctance to end the sweet anticipation of summer’s beginning. “The Invasion from Outer Space” offers near science fiction without robots and dying planets. “People of the Book” is a religious allegory complete with a virgin birth. Meanwhile, “The Next Thing” imagines a faceless corporation that builds a giant underground warehouse store—alluring and mysterious, a bizarre Sam’s Club submerged—only to take over the town above for its own executives.
Literary language, more introspection than action, much exposition, intelligent speculation about the human condition, all woven through sophisticated storytelling.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59590-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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