"The Big Guy is getting our range," says the 60ish protagonist of the title story. Death is catching up with many of the characters in Updike's (Brazil, 1994, etc.) latest short-story collection, which may explain the tilt toward familial reminiscence and corresponding loss of narrative bite. It is memory, memory of a three-way love involving a mother, her son, and their home, that fuels the longest offering, "A Sandstone Farmhouse"; despite moments of exquisite pathos, it is too detailed and static. (A tighter companion piece, "The Black Room," works better.) A much shorter, essaylike fiction celebrates "the smell of family, family without end" that emanates from "The Brown Chest." The family also figures in the more conventionally structured stories. Some old friends, the Maples, reappear in "Grandparenting," jostling amusingly for pride of place at the birth of their first grandchild, while in "Brother Grasshopper," about two brothers-in-law, it is the seemingly feckless one who proves the truer custodian of the family's identity. For the older characters, death is not always an adversary: Carter ("The Afterlife") and Fanshawe ("Playing with Dynamite") feel serenely indifferent to its approach. True terror does strike once, for a cancer victim and her hospital visitor ("The Journey to the Dead"). But Updike's playfulness surfaces in his story of a clairvoyant Scottish caddie ("Farrell's Caddie") and in his witty sketch of a dental hygienist ("Tristan and Iseult"). Nor have the bright lights of adultery altogether dimmed. Two separately married members disrupt their suburban recorder group when they become lovers ("The Man Who Became a Soprano"). Then there is the sparkling "Baby's First Step" in which Glenn, a 36-year-old lawyer, begins a second career as a philanderer by seducing his best friend's wife, and death could not be farther away. Not among the best of Updike's collections, but even the duller stories yield extraordinary pleasures of language and perception.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43583-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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