Twelve ambitious and expert stories, yet seldom involving.
Stories impeccably careful never to raise their voices, though not much is raised in the reader by them, either: a third collection from the novelist and storywriter (Escapes, 1989, etc.).
Cool-toned, expertly kept at a near-toneless pitch, Williams’s pieces have much about them of Raymond Carver, though not his brevity: too often the tales read long. Their characters seem driven in equal parts by meanness, confusion, and craziness, and few of them will charm—though Donna is certainly nicer than the bitchy friend she dutifully, and inexplicably, visits in the mental hospital (“The Visiting Privilege”), and the 11th-grade daughter in “Honored Guest” is far nicer than her monstrous mother, who admittedly is dying, but still. A mother whose son killed himself—he thought he had spikes in his head—gains a bit of sympathy when she repudiates the boy’s druggy and self-involved friends (“Marabou”), but no character has much affect in another death story (“Substance”), where a suicide leaves mundane belongings to various friends, including leaving his dog to one (the others ditch the stuff; the dog person feels she can’t). Tired tropes are revisited as affluent Americans are shown to know less than the Caribbean locals (“Claro”) or as spoiled American kids play at the ex-pat life in Guatemala, supported by their parents (“Fortune”). The ghost of Flannery O’Connor inspirits a tale or two: “Charity,” about an unhappily married and socially conscious woman who is drawn into progressively deeper trouble with a trashy family; and “The Other Week,” an intricate construction about an ex-alcoholic teetering toward an affair with her mentally questionable gardener. After her husband dies, a diabetic woman takes pistol lessons for a while and befriends her instructor (“Anodyne”); another widow, after an evening with her truly mean daughter (“Hammer”), falls off the wagon and dies five years later, at 50, amid a sprinkling of symbols.
Twelve ambitious and expert stories, yet seldom involving.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-44647-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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