TOWN SMOKES

by Pinckney Benedict ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 1987

A promising but uneven first collection of stories by the 22-year-old winner of two Transatlantic Review Awards and the 1986 Nelson Algren Award. In five of the nine stories here, Benedict commands a powerful and poetic voice in the best Southern tradition. The book opens with ""The Sutton Pie Safe,"" a tale of domestic conflict precipitated by a wealthy outsider who wants to buy a family artifact--a Sutton pie safe--from a poor rural family, with results reminiscent of the early stories of Joyce Carol Oates or the idiosyncratic lyric stories of William Goyen. Similarly strong are ""All the Dead"" and ""Hackberry""--the former recounting a boy's search for a drunken and abusive stepfather who has left the house with a gun in search of bootleg alcohol; the latter focusing on violence and alcohol as well, a young unmarried couple's fights juxtaposed with their relationship with a wise, eccentric older neighbor who has deep insight into the husband's violent tendencies. ""Dog"" achieves a strong lyric intensity--evoking Poe and Faulkner--as two mismatched male roommates frantically try to extricate a mangy dog from underneath their trailer home. ""Water Witch,"" the best story here, contains its most stunning poetic writing describing a bleak, arid Texas landscape that reflects the brittle inner lives of the story's characters. ""Booze"" is a tale about the hunt for a destructive boar of mythic proportions, but it suffers somewhat from its lack of dramatic pace in the middle. The title story, about an adolescent boy setting out on his own--ostensibly to buy cigarettes (""town smokes"") but in fact for keeps--after his father's death, is ambitious in conception but disappointingly insubstantial in execution. The remaining two stories seem merely perfunctory. Benedict has written a handful of impressive stories, but his precocious debut volume would have been stronger had he allowed himself the time to accrue more fully-realized stories.

Pub Date: May 27, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Ontario Review--dist. by Persea

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION