Twelve stories about the gritty world of gyms, barracks, brothels, and loony bins that Jones (Cold Snap, 1995, etc.) has already staked out as his own. The tough-guy approach in fiction has fallen (partly) out of favor since Hemingway’s day, but Jones can pull it off with style and without embarrassment. Most of the characters here are decent working-class stiffs who find themselves swamped in a world of mendacity—like Ondine, the Marine sergeant of —The Roadrunner,— —A Run Through the Jungle,— and —Fields of Purple Forever,— who sees action in Vietnam and cannot settle down to peacetime routines afterward. Instead he takes up swimming as both career and pastime, and travels the world to swim across the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Bosphorus. There’s another kind of malcontent in —40, Still at Home—: Matthew Billis, a depressed middle-aged bachelor who is looked after by his harried mother Margo in their nightmarish suburban home (—The room’s textures and color schemes were a fright, like the marriage of Transylvania and Graceland—). —Tarantula— depicts the gradual breakdown of an ambitious graduate student who accepts a high-school post in hopes of becoming headmaster but is driven crazy by the stress of teaching. —Daddy’s Girl— consists of an old woman’s reminiscences about growing up with her two sisters—one of whom eventually became a doctor, then converted to Catholicism and lived the life of a missionary and nun. Best by far is the title story, an elegiac portrait of Kid Dynamite, a small-time boxer past his prime who can—t bring himself to give up the game that is killing him. Slice of life that will not be to everyone’s taste, rendered with honest realism (and without nostalgia) by one of our finer stylists.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-47223-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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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