Glum fun.
A set of stories about senses and sensory deprivation from contemporary American literature’s longtime laureate of disillusionment.
Gass (Middle C, 2013, etc.) has always been a love-hate proposition. He's an exquisite maker of sentences, weighing his prose like a poet for rhythm, consonance, and intellectual heft. (“Color is a lure. Color is candy….Color is oratory in the service of the wrong religion….Color is camouflage.”) But his fiction is a tough sell, built as it is out of storm clouds and fury at a humanity that has forever fallen short. The two novellas that anchor this collection reveal the upsides and downsides of that approach. The excellent, punningly titled “In Camera” is set in a photography gallery whose holdings are carefully guarded by its owner and whose acquisition processes may not be strictly legal. That question gives the story its drama, but Gass is more interested in exploring the ways photographs can render (and in a way surpass) reality, closing with a dry but artful riff on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” “Charity,” a story almost entirely without paragraph breaks, explores one man’s lifetime of exasperation with pleas for donations, from cookie-schlepping Girl Scouts to junk mail to telemarketers; the feeling of oppression Gass creates is palpable if static; its dour mood rarely shifts. The remaining stories are shorter (if not necessarily lighter) experiments in form and style: a story told from the perspective of the prop piano in Casablanca, another about a man who communicates solely with his hands, a man recalling his childhood in fragmented prose that evokes stray puzzle pieces. It says something about Gass’ talent and flexibility that he can write an effective story that’s narrated by a barber-shop folding chair. But this is Gass’ universe, and here, even folding chairs don’t get off easy.
Glum fun.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87472-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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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