These stories aren’t always easy to take, but they have the brevity, sharp focus, and corrosive anger of good punk rock.
The characters in Boilard’s version of Western Massachusetts are prone to cheap highs, faceless sex, and predictable violent outbursts. Boilard dares you to care about these characters, but he doesn’t always make it easy.
These stories probe the moral and economic squalor that exists below the surface of a respectable college town. Yet Boilard doesn’t examine how the characters got that way; he lets them slog through their lives and speak for themselves. Substance abuse and horrible parenting are both frequent themes: in “Nice Sleep,” a mother with an opiate addiction and an abusive boyfriend barely registers suffocating her son in a parked car. In “Sometimes There’s God,” a guy who makes a living beating people up gets too drunk to remember that he’s killed the lover of the stripper girlfriend he’s been cheating on. In “Storm Chaser,” a shellshocked war veteran is grateful for the fits of violence that send him back to jail, where he feels most comfortable. And in the most haunting story, “The Mohawk Trail,” a forgiving and love-starved son speaks as he dies after a drunken driving accident caused by his father. The only stories that don’t work are the two that are told in the Bright Lights, Big City style of manic second-person narrative.
These stories aren’t always easy to take, but they have the brevity, sharp focus, and corrosive anger of good punk rock.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941088-62-3
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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