Delightful examples of Donoghue’s all-encompassing talent that should be read by fans of her period pieces as well as her...
The author of two intelligent, atmospheric historical novels, Slammerkin (2001) and Life Mask (2004), reapplies her sharp eye to the contemporary world in 19 engaging short stories.
How we live today is not a new subject for Donoghue, whose early fiction includes the coming-of-age tale Stir-Fry (1994) and an elegiac portrait of a long-term lesbian romance (Hood, 1996). Same-sex affairs and general gender confusion remain fruitful topics for the author’s unsentimental probing in such stories as “Team Men,” “Speaking in Tongues” and “The Welcome”—the latter also geing a very funny portrait of politically correct collective life in a women’s commune. But just as Donoghue can rove from the historic to the modern world, she matches the acuity of her looks at homosexual relations with her astuteness about heterosexual families (“Through the Night”), the longing for a baby (the hilarious title story and “The Man Who Wrote on Beaches”) and people’s obsessive devotion to their pets (“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and “The Cost of Things”). Not that these stories can be categorized under a single category heading; they’re too multifaceted, too cognizant of the complexity of human nature for that. Donoghue has the born storyteller’s knack for sketching a personality and pulling readers into a plot in just a few pages, and she confidently changes scenes from her native Ireland to her current home in Canada or America’s West Coast without ever losing her ability to evoke authentic emotions and landscapes. Most impressive of all is her gentleness toward her characters: “WritOr,” the chronicle of a Writer-in-Residence’s bleak sojourn to a small-town college contains some of the funniest, saddest descriptions ever of people’s pathetic delusions of literary grandeur, concluding with someone of genuine talent turning up in the writer’s office, leaving him “dangling somewhere between hope and despair.”
Delightful examples of Donoghue’s all-encompassing talent that should be read by fans of her period pieces as well as her gay audience—indeed, by anyone who cherishes thoughtful, warm-hearted fiction.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101386-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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