Graham and Ernest move over, you’ve got company.
Bissell follows a nonfiction account of his travels in Central Asia (Chasing the Sea, 2003) with this slim but rigorous debut collection of six darkly passionate stories about Americans who have chosen to visit or live in that most difficult part of the world.
In “Death Defier,” a very ill British correspondent and a healthy American photojournalist become stranded somewhere in Afghanistan. On a hopeless quest for grasses that the local warlord says can cure malaria, the American remembers his haphazard evolution from midwestern nobody to chronicler of death as he heads toward his own fate. While Bissell paints a vivid picture of the Central Asian world, this opening story is primarily a character study, as is the final piece, “Animals in Our Lives,” in which the protagonist, having returned from abroad, is unable to find a place for himself in his old life or with the woman he loves. But in most of the tales, the region and its native inhabitants come to the forefront to defeat the generally hapless and morally iffy Americans. A humorless, by-the-books biologist on her way to study the pollution of the “Aral,” the sea in Turkistan, finds herself kidnapped by a mysterious Russian she assumes is KGB until he introduces her to his blinded, orphaned children. A trust-fund couple buoying up a failing marriage with “Expensive Trips Nowhere” end up in Kazakhstan, where the husband shows his cowardice and the wife finds herself increasingly drawn to their guide, a veteran of the Afghan war whose knowing disdain for his charges does not rule out sex. “The Ambassador’s Son,” a degenerate wastrel, finally gets in over his head when he takes on the local degenerates. In the almost Dostoyevskian title story, a missionary teacher who already considers himself corrupted by his affair with a local man faces ultimate moral defeat before his students.
Graham and Ernest move over, you’ve got company.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42264-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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