Varied, engaging, and often shocking.
A career-spanning collection of short stories that illustrates the writer’s preoccupation with animals, artists, and the fantastical.
The stories in this volume—split into sections called “Among the Animals,” “Among the Artists,” and “Metamorphoses”—were gathered from more than 30 years of Martin’s published work (The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, 2014, etc.). But one recurring question, which Martin voices in her introduction, is strung through them all: “Are we animals, or are we something else?” Whether they’re self-absorbed painters, deserted women, or even centaurs, Martin’s characters are torn between the facades they don and the baser, more animalistic impulses—the needs for power, attention, and revenge—that animate them. In "Spats," Lydia, who’s recently been abandoned by her husband, contemplates exacting revenge on his beloved dogs, which are still in her care. "The Freeze" finds a middle-aged teacher spurned by a young love interest at a party; in a resulting state of self-pity, she ignores an ominous noise outside her house during a thunderstorm. "Among the Artists" offers "The Unfinished Novel," the collection’s standout. Maxwell, a moderately successful novelist, is visiting his hometown of New Orleans when he encounters Rita Richard, a former lover from his graduate writing program who broke his heart long ago. Once golden-haired and blessed with a prose style that “made us all sick with envy,” Rita is now frumpy and still unpublished, so Maxwell assures himself of his superiority; but when, after her death, he finds himself in possession of her writing, he must decide between his curiosity and contempt. Here, the characters are sketched with such complexity that the reader’s sympathies are torn for the whole story. While the final section showcases Martin’s imagination—a brutal mermaid watches humans drown in the eponymous "Sea Lovers"; a centaur falls in love with the opera in "Et In Arcadiana Ego"—Martin doesn’t enter those characters’ minds quite as deeply as in her other stories, making them less emotionally appealing. But overall, this is an insightful look into the evolution of Martin’s writing and her talent for depicting our darker natures.
Varied, engaging, and often shocking.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53352-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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