Banjo Grease

The author of Brother Carnival and The World's Smallest Bible examines small-town life in this collection of sixteen stories. There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term "eager fatalism." These stories' cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naivet for worldliness, what is lost in denying one's past?"These stories float through the reader like frozen images. Each one fits into the others unevenly as jagged glass. This is the essence of great fiction at the end of the century;...