Vintage Boyle, and not to be missed.
Darker tones and an impressive range of subjects dominate this impressive collection of 14 vivid stories, the seventh from one of our most versatile and prolific writers.
Boyle displays his manic surrealist’s wares in wry tales concerning a roughhewn Shetland Islander whose unlikely romance with a lissome American ornithologist is imperiled by violent winds continuously plaguing the isle of Unst (“Swept Away”); a retiree’s passive adjustment to a Florida theme park and housing complex transformed by its draconian “Covenants and Restrictions” into an Orwellian nightmare (“Jubilation”); and in the superb “Dogology,” which juxtaposes a revenge tale involving feral children in India with the regression of a woman field biologist who undertakes “reordering her senses” through intimate orientation in the canine world. Several considerably grimmer stories focus on hapless substance abusers: a recently divorced narrator who encounters the grieving father of a college fraternity drinking binge’s victim (“When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone”); a destitute loser sunk in homelessness and hopelessness (“Here Comes”); and an unstable drunk whose repeated risk-taking undermines his continuing dumb luck (“All the Wrecks I’ve Crawled Out Of”). A sense of looming global catastrophe takes the varied forms of a Mexican rancher’s disbelieving encounter with a “doomsaying” scientist (“Blinded by the Light”); the father of a reported fatal auto crash’s victim, obsessed with past and future Armageddons (“Chicxlub”); and—metaphorically—in the title story’s account of its underachieving protagonist’s enslavement to a ferociously untameable African predator. Even better are the tale of a radio co-host’s assault on the world record for “continuous hours without sleep” (“The Kind Assassin”); a rich fictionalization of the famous journal detailing Sarah Kemble Knight’s arduous travels through the rural colonial northeastern U.S. (“The Doubtfulness of Water”); and a perfectly calibrated portrayal of a callow “ghetto school” teacher’s scary walk on the wild side (“Up Against the Wall”).
Vintage Boyle, and not to be missed.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03435-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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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