Ambitious writing, but, for the reader, more effortful than rewarding.
From poet and writer Svoboda (A Drink Called Paradise, 1999), a novella and 14 small and usually gnomic stories in a collection that has some moments of allure but puzzles and poses more than it stirs.
In the stories, Svoboda has a way of setting aside the credible in exchange either for a highly oblique way of telling or an archness in tone that then becomes what sustains the piece—as in "Sundress," about a derelict but highly glib couple who pretend to be house-sitters, or "Electricity" (about self-involved and uncaring parents), a complexly daring but unmoving piece. At times, the self-consciousness simply overwhelms what could in fact be moving, as in "Doll," about a brother and sister in childhood; the less believable "Cave Life," about two Flamenco dancers beaten down by a snowy winter; or "Psychic," a kind of trick O. Henry tale. Yet at some moments the power of real life does rise up out of Svoboda's words, as in "Petrified Woman," about a mother tyrannizing her grown daughter, or "Party Girl," a pitch-perfect rendering of teenaged girls at a slumber party. The title novella, filling something over half the volume, tries hard to lift emotion up out of squalor, but, by and large, the squalor wins. Having previously been institutionalized, Svoboda's narrator now lives in a trailer court that seems almost the pinnacle of grotesquerie and ruin. Semi-wild kids run around, the narrator (known as "the trash lady") survives on cat food and hot dogs, and in the trailers around her, when TV isn't being watched, there are sex, threats, beatings, and, before end, will be torture, madness, and murder. The trailer girl, trying to help just one lost victim, observes all as best she can, a kind of parallel to the herd of cows that gaze from the other side of the gulch.
Ambitious writing, but, for the reader, more effortful than rewarding.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58243-085-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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