Throughout Trevor's series of collections of beautifully crafted, acute, and affecting short stories, there has never been that outcropping of self-parody that is apt to afflict the work of prolific practitioners of such a confining art form. Each of Trevor's Fate-shackled characters who loiter into a twilight sadness—or bemused acceptance of Things-As-They-Inexplicably-Are—is a fully realized, breathing being who occupies unique space and time. Here, men and women struggle within the labyrinth of family—with its indelible stains from the past and its present imperatives for predator and prey. In the title story, a grandfather's cruelty is amplified and adapted by a grandson and visited upon a vulnerable girl. The daughter of a suicide in "In Love with Ariadne" lives in the shadow of her father's sin and shame. Then public shame scorches two rural families whose security is community reputation: in "A Husband's Return," family "silence" will deny a scandal, but will also doom compassion and love; an aging couple in "Events at Drimaghleen," whose tragedy was absorbed by respectful and sympathetic neighbors, is victimized by a team of brass-headed journalists to find themselves uprooted, exposed in scandal. Fathers also unwittingly wound children: a young girl is hired out for a hated servant's job while her dear dad gains a longed-for field; and a headmaster's son bears the crushing burden of his family's honor among violent-minded schoolboys. Love, or its souring, is sometimes cruel, too—"unsuitable." A single woman reflects on one brief, long-ago idyll with a married man: "For both of them, the pattern of their lives has formed around a moment in an afternoon." In another tale, a man sent by his estranged wife to discuss future plans with her apparently future husband (who's rather a fathead) turns some screws, boozily enjoying himself in a bar, but at last cannot release his lying, impossible wife—and he doesn't know why. Another fine collection by this Irish author, here centering on the plight of people held fast by the familial network of peculiar tensions that can both hold and strangle.
Pub Date: May 1, 1990
ISBN: 0886194415
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1990
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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