It's hard to feel warmth from these stories; passions are mitigated or tamped down. But the writing is clever and skillful...
In her debut short story collection, McFarlane (The Night Guest, 2013) limns the hidden spaces of relationships.
It's impossible to say, at the onset of any of these stories, how grounded they will stay in the familiar. Some are entirely realistic. "The Mycenae" follows a humble Australian couple on vacation in Greece with their patrician American friends and plumbs the emotional disconnect. "Cara Mia" employs an even lighter touch to glimpse the inner life of a young Australian teen with a subtly complex family life. "Those Americans Falling from the Sky" has a similar flavor, but its wartime setting and the fate of some stationed American soldiers tinge it with mortality. Death has a larger presence in "Exotic Animal Medicine," which traces an unconventional wedding day in England; "Man and Bird" incorporates death as well as the sublime. Several of the stories levitate into surreal planes with very different moods. "Buttony" reads like sci-fi horror, while "Violet, Violet" is playful in its exploration of loneliness and the question of an uncanny bird. "The Movie People" does the same for connection and escapism—townspeople involved in a local film shoot refuse to let the magic go—and is quite funny. The title story is brutal and biblical. "Unnecessary Gifts" is a bit of an outlier, an exercise in suspense that teases readers’ expectations. Yet all these feats are pulled off while never technically escaping reality. McFarlane writes with a deceptively plain hand, and her style gives shape to the unanswered questions of how well we can ever know each other or ourselves. What she leaves out is more telling than what she describes.
It's hard to feel warmth from these stories; passions are mitigated or tamped down. But the writing is clever and skillful in spades.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8654-7804-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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