Don’t miss this introduction to a genuinely talented find.
Salinger meets Rabelais in a fresh, profoundly human debut collection that meditates on growing up, falling apart and simply being dazzled or bollixed by the wondrous puzzlement of life.
Pushcart Prize–winner Puchner crams his nine terrific stories with memorable and just-right detail, bits of observation that work like bite-sized poems. The author has a sharp eye and a warm touch, and it’s impossible not to identify with his mixed-up characters and the messy lives they gamely muddle through. Hired to assist special needs cases, a reluctant social worker discovers that his “developmentally disabled” charges are themselves unsung heroes, dear and tough (“Children of God”); combing the aisles of a pet store for neon tetras for the family aquarium, a young son senses something strange—his dad’s puppyish crush on the sexy salesclerk (“Neon Tetras”); asked to write an essay for Lit 101 about Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” a mall-minded teen queen turns in a nightmare, dubbing the august Irish seer a “mentally ill person” whose poetry pales beside that of heartthrob Colin Sweep, lead singer of the death-metal monstrosity, Salacious Universe (“Essay #3: Leda and the Swan”). Comedy is Puchner’s forte, but he’s especially good at the bittersweet. “Mission,” about the star student of an ESL class who plots revenge after the teacher dares to question her word choice, is perhaps the best story here. The student’s affronted hot-headedness is both crazy and heartbreaking, and so too are the lengths to which her teacher goes in order to reclaim his “lost sheep.” Puchner is a hip writer, his language colloquial and his tone knowing. But he’s never ironic, never less than wise.
Don’t miss this introduction to a genuinely talented find.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7046-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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