A short, quirky and sometimes-compelling book from the author of The Flamethrowers (2013).
Three offbeat tales that border on the surreal yet are curiously (and paradoxically) anchored in a version of historical reality.
In the first story, “The Great Exception,” an unnamed admiral tells a queen he believes the Earth is pear-shaped rather than round and requests money to allow him to fulfill his vision of exploration. This she grants him, though his voyage concludes with the natives of “Kuba” cooking and eating him. (First, however, they sever his toes so he can't “tromp inland and subjugate the island.”) While awaiting word of the disposition of the admiral’s voyage, the queen pines for him with an intensity bordering on the sexual. In “Debouchment,” despite a woman’s disclaimer that life on an island (also reminiscent of Cuba) is not especially violent, a faith healer provides hope to the people in his illegal radio broadcasts—all this in a landscape where there are “humans hanging in the trees beyond the security fence.” The final story is the most complex and subtle, and it gives the collection its title. The action unfolds explicitly in Havana in 1952 against a backdrop of Batista's rise to power; it focuses on the mysterious Rachel K, a “zazou” dancer from Paris who entertains (in all senses) her male audience and particularly gets the attention of Christian de la Mazière, a French Nazi now living on the island after having been sentenced to five years in a rather cushy prison.
A short, quirky and sometimes-compelling book from the author of The Flamethrowers (2013).Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2421-5
Page Count: 96
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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