Town Smokes

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. (Kirkus Reviews)