Uneven in execution, but permeated with a mature understanding that our lives are an accumulation of moments—and we live...
In her third story volume, McCorkle (Final Vinyl Days, 1998, etc.) again demonstrates that there’s room to grow in New Southern fiction as she explores various stages of human existence with emphasis on our kinship with animals.
It’s the narrative voice that distinguishes this North Carolina–born author from her less accomplished regional peers. McCorkle’s prose is contemporary without annoying K-Mart modernism, cognizant of her characters’ quirks without making them gothic freaks. Only the ubiquitous animal metaphors are occasionally strained, though they work brilliantly in the best pieces. “Billy Goats” ponders human vulnerability and male cruelty as the adult narrator recalls biking at dusk with other friends “too old for kick the can and too young to make out,” vowing never to be like the disappointed, depressed adults in their small hometown. (Scattered references pinpoint McCorkle’s habitual setting of Fulton, North Carolina.) “Hominids” is a scathing monologue by a 40ish wife sick to death of the dirty jokes and obsession with breasts of the men gathered for her husband’s annual golf weekend—readers can easily imagine the guys beating their chests and posturing for fellow gorillas. Not that the female characters are perfect: “If I were a dog I would have been put down by now,” boasts the angry, self-isolated narrator of “Dogs,” and the dead mother in “Toads” is revealed to have stifled two husbands with her insistence on being a depressed victim. Some of the best stories in the collection, which follows the arc of a lifespan, concern the elderly. Strongest of all is “Turtles,” a searing portrait of life in a nursing home and the slow, agonizing loss of mental and physical faculties. Though McCorkle deals uncompromisingly with often grim material, there’s still plenty of tough-minded humor and an elegiac tenderness for happiness past, struggles long ago won or lost, our perennial yearning for love.
Uneven in execution, but permeated with a mature understanding that our lives are an accumulation of moments—and we live most fully when we slow down to savor or recollect them.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-256-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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
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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