Wherever these stories take the reader, the tone is quintessential McGuane.
A writer renowned for his evocation of the wide-open spaces of the American West (his native Montana in particular) here explores a rewarding range of both geographical and thematic terrain within his second collection (after Nothing But Blue Skies, 1992).
Throughout these ten stories of place and displacement by novelist McGuane (The Cadence of Grass, 2002, etc.), geography forges character and character shapes destiny. It’s a reflection of his consummate command that his fiction can be simultaneously so funny and so bleak. Whether he’s writing in the first or third person (with both narrative approaches prevalent here), his characters contend with minor frustrations and everyday absurdities within lives that just might be pointless, inconsequential beneath the big sky. His settings extend from the West to New England (in both “Aliens” and the concluding title story, the culture clash between Montana and Boston proves crucial) and from the Great Lakes to Key West. As the collection’s penultimate story, “The Refugee” is the longest (comprising more than a quarter of the volume’s pages) and perhaps the most ambitious, reflecting the mind of a suicidal alcoholic who tries to find some semblance of stability on the sea, attempts to come to terms with his role in the death of a friend who had betrayed him (was it an accident or murder?) and ultimately finds himself both marooned and returned to some sort of Eden. Among the other standouts, “Miracle Boy” conjures the slapstick of mourning within the mysteries of family; “Old Friends” details the inertia of the relationship between life-long friends who have never really liked each other; “Ice” finds a man reminiscing about his Midwestern boyhood, in a coming-of-age story that stirs sexual awakening and intimations of mortality; and the darkly comic “The Zombie” relates the tale of a banker’s son determined to retain his virginity and the escort hired by his father to seduce him.
Wherever these stories take the reader, the tone is quintessential McGuane.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4156-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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