A surprisingly uneven assemblage that, nevertheless, hits several astonishing highs. These 14 tales in Wolff's third collection (Back in the World, 1985; In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, 1981) deal variously with combative family relationships, the sources of violence and neurosis lying just beneath suburban and quotidian surfaces, and memories of the war in Vietnam (e.g., ``Casualty'' and ``The Other Miller'') that possess and transform those who served and suffered there. Wolff is at his weakest when his stories seem too nakedly personal (as in ``Powder'' and ``Firelight''), or when they're too clearly the products of controlling ideas—such as the unbelievable tale ``A Bullet in the Brain,'' in which a vitriolic book-reviewer can't help heckling the bank robber who's holding him at gunpoint, and is shot to death. Forget these stories, but do not miss: ``Flyboys,'' a portrayal of unstable teenage friendship in which Wolff brilliantly evokes the controlled emotions of a boy who resists being pulled into the orbit of a suffering family; ``Mortals,'' a snaky, surprising piece about a composer of newspaper obituaries who's fired when he fails to check on a reported death, and undergoes a strange encounter with the man whom he had, as it were, pronounced dead; ``Smorgasbord,'' a charming comedy involving horny prep-school students, the alluring stepmother of a dictator's son, and the process of shedding youth's romantic illusions; and especially ``The Chain,'' which opens with a terrifyingly vivid description of a man rescuing his small daughter from a vicious dog, then slowly, deftly traces the vengeful ``chain'' of violent acts that result from his reluctant complicity in a plot to punish the dog's callous owners. This tale is a dazzler, plotted with really remarkable ingenuity. Understatement, irony, and surprising juxtapositions are the key ingredients of these generally accomplished and resonant fictions—the best of which are certainly among the most accomplished being written in our time. (First printing of 30,000)
Pub Date: Oct. 9, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-40218-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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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