This catch-all volume is clever and readable throughout, but nowhere near the best this writer can do.
This first collection of 15 stories, drawn from Parks’s entire career, is both informed and cramped by the subject which gave one of his most vivid novels its title: adultery.
That’s also the subject implicit in the title of the opening story, in which two married men talk about their very different extramarital affairs: sobersided Michael’s guilty relationship with a decent younger woman and amoral George’s vainglorious carousing with a mistress who (according to George) is an erotic virtuoso. Meeting in pubs following their weekly squash games, Michael and George exchange stories, confess and boast and embroider, until their unequal odd-couple friendship gradually shifts, revealing “stories” each wishes, finally, not to hear. It’s an intriguing, if not terribly original, story—particularly when compared with several embarrassingly slight treatments of similar material, notably a story concerning the shared apartment rented by two male friends for their separate assignations (“The Room”) and a surprisingly hollow account of a naïve wife’s refusal to draw the obvious conclusion from overwhelming evidence of her husband’s faithlessness (“Something Odd”). One assumes these two are among Parks’s earliest, but none are dated. A pair of stories stands out. The first is the tale of a work-weary canoeist who seeks challenge and danger by navigating the tricky waters beneath a bridge where illegal immigrants have made their home (“In Defiance of Club Rules”)—it’s an ingenious variation on the theme of Parks’s most recent novel, Rapids, and a deft contrast between contrived thrill-seeking and lives lived in genuine peril. The second, even better, story is “Lebensraum,” in which a family gathering leaves the members sealed protectively—and resentfully—within their passive solitude and egoism. In scarcely 35 pages, it’s a taut, blistering novella: further proof that when Parks moves beyond the shorter form, his work soars.
This catch-all volume is clever and readable throughout, but nowhere near the best this writer can do.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-84391-704-1
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Hesperus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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