ST. AUGUSTINE'S PIGEON: The Selected Stories

by Evan S. Connell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 1980

Connell's fiction has about it a sere and fastidious strangeness (there's no other word for it), which comes across clearly in this quilt of short pieces--nine stories previously collected in early books, seven not. The opening piece, ""The Yellow Raft,"" is the best thing here: a vividly visual, precisely dry daytime nightmare of illusory survival and rescue in the South Pacific, something like an update of Stephen Crane's ""The Open Boat""; the story is emblematic of Connell's overall mood, in which you are always aware of disappearance and invisibility, history scrabbling away as lives are lived behind masks and separate intentions clank when they meet. In other pieces, however, Connell takes a sepulchrally comic approach to this sense of life as peekaboo, and these feature Muhlbach, an insurance executive of mild mien and scary, in-turned complexity who has appeared in Connell's novels: in ""Otto and the Magi,"" the disgusted and weary Muhlbach builds a fallout shelter, the air pipe of which his son Otto promptly (though with warning) plugs up with a potato the first night Muhlbach tries to sleep within; in ""Arcturus,"" Muhlbach's dying young wife is leaving him alone with his disdain and oblique learnedness; in ""St. Augustine's Pigeon,"" Muhlbach drags along the chains of lust. And two other stories change the tabula rasa Muhlbach character--only very slightly, really--into that of a man named Koerner, a personality-less wanderer to whom adheres the furiousness of other people's pain and guilt (""The Caribbean Provedor,"" a Dostoevskyan bar encounter, is very fine). The rest here, however, is not as good: kinked anecdotes, cluttered or ungainly fables, with little of the compounded interest of Connell's novels. So--only a few examples of Connell at his oddest, shadowless best, but a welcome and genuinely distinctive collection overall.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: North Point Press (850 Talbot Ave., Berkeley, Ca. 94706)

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION