Now that this excellent series is firmly established among must-read annuals, Ravenel should skip the apologetic introductions in which she repeatedly tries to justify the regional basis for her anthology. The evidence speaks for itself here—16 stories by or about southerners that embrace a wide range of literary and geographical experience. Many of the stories focus on coming-of-age in the South, from Nanci Kincaid's teenage girls hanging out at a Tallahassee movie theater (``This is Not the Picture Show'') to Jill McCorkle's shy young girl who lives vicariously through the postcards form her wild, older sister (``Waiting for the Hard Times to End''). Young people deal with domestic tragedy in Barbara Hudson's ``The Arabesque,'' the story of two sisters confronted by their mother's madness and early death; in Rick Bass's ``In the Loyal Mountains,'' a beautifully written profile of the narrator's big-spending Texan uncle who commits suicide rather than suffer the consequences of his shady business dealings; and in Reynolds Price's overwrought ``His Final Mother,'' a boy's meditation on his mother's sudden death. Lee Smith's ``Intensive Care,'' the story of a former high-school nerd who pursues an improbable passion, confronts death with a healthy dose of schmaltz. The least convincing narrative voices here include the successful Vietnamese immigrant in Robert Olen Butler's ``Relic,'' the young grandmother of Bobbie Ann Mason's typically hard-luck ``With Jazz,'' and the drunk and sexually inadequate good old boy of Larry Brown's ``Big Bad Love.'' The strongest pieces range from Mark Richard's hilarious and sad tale of boys in an orphanage hospital on Christmas Eve (``The Birds for Christmas'') to Susan Starr Richards's unusual paean to porch life and the strange bonds of sisters in ``The Screened Porch.'' Robert Morgan's story of a Civil War-era stone mason (``Poinsett's Bridge'') and Thomas Phillips Brewer's riff on southern junkies (``Black Cat Bone'') add an interesting dimension to a somewhat homogeneous volume. Peter Taylor's graceful and evocative ``Cousin Aubrey'' easily earns its lead-off position. Once again, southern fiction mostly at its best.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-945575-82-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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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