Graceful but with few surprises.
Romantic collapses and mismatches abound, often in all-too-familiar ways, in the debut story collection from Barbash (On Top of the World, 2003, etc.).
If Raymond Carver had lived in Manhattan, he might have delivered stories like “The Break,” in which a serious author despairs over the low-rent, bosomy waitress her college-age son hooks up with, or “Balloon Night,” in which a man tries to cover up for his estranged wife’s absence at a party celebrating the Thanksgiving Day parade. (His apartment offers a view of the parade balloons being inflated, hence the title.) The Carver-esque strokes are evident: The clipped style, the bad romantic choices, the sense that the protagonists are victims of self-delusion, a tad too dim to recognize the awfulness of their predicaments. If the approach is derivative, Barbash at least has clear empathy for the many adolescents who inhabit his stories: In “Howling at the Moon,” a teenager awkwardly adjusts to his mother’s relationship to a wealthy man, the boy calibrating his movements among his possible future stepsiblings, while the boy in “January” takes a certain glee in watching his mother’s new boyfriend stumble. Yet each busted-love tale moves to well-worn conclusions, from the foolhardy May-December romance (“Spectator”) to the story about a man anxious about one of his students dating his son (“Her Words”). Barbash has a gift for crispness and clarity, and he can be entertaining when he busts out of the upscale dirty-realist groove, as in an epistolary story in which a tennis academy headmaster loses his grip on a star student. But Barbash's attempts to explore class conflict lead to missteps like “Paris,” in which a reporter condescends to the poverty-stricken town he reports on, with an ending that’s less comeuppance than non sequitur.
Graceful but with few surprises.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-225812-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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