Helprin needs space to work his magic, room to build up steam, but even in these short bursts, he often accomplishes what...
Sixteen tales of war, love, the achingly beautiful past and the fallen present.
It’s been about a decade since his last novel (Memoir From Antproof Case, 1995), so Helprin tosses out a story collection, as if that will be enough. And it almost is. The opener, “Il Colore Ritrovato,” is a graceful inversion of the expected, a good taste of what’s to come—as an opera impresario tries to convince a young singer not to sign with him yet, as success could dull her gift. “A Brilliant Idea, and His Own” is a straightforward adventure, set in WWII Italy: A British forward fire observer critically injures himself parachuting behind German lines and struggles to stay alive to accomplish his mission. Smaller pieces are less resonant, like the title story, about a female welder who pines for her love serving in the Pacific, and “Sail Shining in White,” about an aged retiree who sails into a massive hurricane, most likely to die but absolutely determined to live. The jewel here is the aptly titled “Perfection.” In 1950s New York, it follows a 14-year-old Holocaust survivor who’s given a divine mission: to save the Yankees from their slump. The absurd scene at the center of the story is oddly delightful: a slight boy in full Orthodox regalia, ignorant of baseball and everything modern, striding to the plate at Yankee Stadium and showing “Mickey Mental” how to hit home runs. Its magical vision of baseball’s glorious design seems almost divine (“All was grace and perfection here, all just and redeemed, all prayer answered, ratios exact, rhythms perfect, laws obeyed”), the kind of thing W.P. Kinsella was once able to conjure at will.
Helprin needs space to work his magic, room to build up steam, but even in these short bursts, he often accomplishes what others take hundreds of pages to achieve.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-036-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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