Poirier’s first collection, stories of young people in Tucson, begins with excessive cuteness, but as his interest in self- conscious novelty declines, the emotional density increases, making for an unevenly satisfying volume. Poirier starts too many of these 12 roughly linked tales like this: “She was called Jackpot because when she was born, sixty- one cents” worth of coins slid out of her mother’s cooch,” and “Camping on the hill wasn—t that bad except for the stories of Sugar, the demented, fat brown bear who had supposedly raped a girl in “85.” After making his point that weird people merit being written about, Poirier digs a little deeper and finds rewarding material. Each of these pieces features young men and women who drink and drug too much, suffer dysfunctional families, and live in vague proximity to college, yet are capable of the Young Writer’s stock-in-trade: the privately touching, miniature epiphany. “Chigger,” a hair-covered youth, turns up in a couple of places, as does his mother, Mary, “the Monkey Lady.” The narrator’sometimes a sidekick to Chigger, sometimes a winsomely observant third person—tells these tales with a trained fluidity, and in “Tilt-A-Whirl,” when he describes how Mary lost her leg, and how Chigger subsequently buried it, he achieves an affecting, heartfelt power. In one of the strongest tales, “La Zona Roja,” he recalls his brother’s death after falling short on a roof dive into a pool. When asked about it by a stranger, he says, “That’s not really what happened.” This is apt’suggesting the unspoken things that insulate loss and keep us silent—but is rare here and lends a scattershot quality to the selections. The reader is as likely to finish a story with a groan as with a sigh. One hopes Poirier’s enrollment in the Girl-With-Green- Hair school of fiction will expire and free him to explore the emotional candor that is his strength.
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60447-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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