GRANITE STORIES

An episodic novel based on true stories of the tough men and women of a rural Oregon mining town.

Bennett’s debut is a “working man’s ditty” that blends fiction and history in a rambling work that serves as a portrait of a particular place and time. Characters include such wanderers as guitar player Katy Gunn, geologist Timothy O’Leary, and longtime couple Smokey and Angelina, as well as lifelong townsfolk. Narratives surrounding life at the local gold mine in the 1970s and ’80s are accentuated by complementary accounts of the same area in the late 1800s, contemporary and old-time song lyrics, and interviews and notes at the ends of some chapters courtesy of a 1930s Federal Writers’ Project, which Bennett uses to show similarities between generations. This is best done when the author attends to the motif of music, which is woven throughout the work in various forms—an inherited guitar, a jukebox, fiddlers on a porch—and helps to convey the sense of community in the town and in the mine. Bennett would better serve his subjects with less transcriptlike dialogue and without clunky transitions to historical accounts. The language also lacks polish at times and can be repetitive, which distracts from the sentimental stories. Still, Bennett’s fondness for his subjects is clear in his tender characterizations: “I guess that Smokey and Angelina’s brand of argument wasn’t really [an] argument, but an affirmation of an independence that didn’t actually exist between them.” As such, the reader cannot help but feel the sadness at the trials life throws at these folks, although there are triumphs, as well. In a description of the main streets of Granite, he’s equally as touching, steering the reader as if they were driving a pickup truck “Past a life that used to be. Past a life that hadn’t gotten around to letting go completely, just yet.”

A nostalgic account of working-class people.