Customer Reviews

BOX SOCIALS.

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

W.P. Kinsella may well be the greatest writer of baseball fiction in America. Except for a few lines at the first and the last of the book, this isn't about baseball. W.P. Kinsella is a fine novelist. This book is not really a novel. It is a short story which has been padded until it is novel length. The New York times likens it to the "humerous voice of Garrison Keillor." That may well be the cruk of its problem. Kinsella uses a Keilloresque trick of giving long, descriptive names to people and then repeating them each time he encounters them in his monologue. This works for Garrison Keillor; it does not work for Kinsella. Instead of making the book funny, it makes the book hard to read. In the end, I did what no one should have to do with a favorite author; I finished the book from a sense of duty

I picked this book up in the Sports Section of my local library, and I was ready for a good baseball yarn during my beach vacation. Well, baseball is barely incidental to this story of a few defining moments in the lives of people living in rural Alberta, Canada, during WWII.

The narrator, who is presumably an adult by the time he writes the book, tells about events that occurred when he was probably 10 or 12 years old. He's old enough to notice some things, but young enough to not quite understand everything. For example, he can tell that boys like girls, and that it has something to do with rubbing together, but he doesn't really have a "fix" on what it is at the time. And he's gradually becoming aware that the people of the six rural villages that make up the region will gossip behind each other's backs, even as they go to extraordinary lengths to help each other overcome poverty, poor crop cycles, and bitter winters.

The book evocatively takes you to that place and era of hard-to-imagine hardship. As you sink into that world, you think affectionately about the characters, but you also thank your stars that you don't have to live such a tough life or in a place where everyone knows your business so well. If anything, it gets kind of tedious to try to keep track of all these people with the same last name and uncertain familial relations.

The narrator ostensibly is going to tell the story of Truckbox Al McClintock, a strapping teenager who is the best home-run hitter in the area, and who gets to play in an all-star game against American pros who are touring as part of the war effort. But in getting to that story, the narrator diverges to tell tales about his life and the lives of the people he knows. He tells about box socials (dances where women or girls elaborately decorate box lunches, which are auctioned to eager boys who get to eat with the designer of the box), drink-fests for every occasion, and other socializing in town. In fact, socializing is the only activity that people could afford to do when taking a break from farming, fishing or hunting for survival. Times were hard, and the book does a great job of obliquely reminding the reader every so often that people were surviving winters of 20-below-zero in log cabins heated by single stoves.

The problem with the book is that the style is highly repetitive. The author repeats stock phrases over and over, as a device to mimic how an entertaining storyteller might operate in-person. But this isn't in-person; it's a book. I started skipping those phrases, which sometimes would come up on 3-4 pages in a row. Quite literally, 10% of the book could be eliminated simply by cutting the redundancies, and the book would be better. The charm of those turns of phrase -- "skinny Indian pitcher named Eddie Grassfires, whose only saving grace was a passable pickoff move to first base," "chokecherry wine, dandelion wine, raisin wine, blackberry wine, homemade beer, and Healthen's rapture, or plain old bring-on-blindness, logging-boot-to-the-side-of-the-head homebrew" -- wears thin after 10 times.

Also, the author doesn't explain how these people with minimal educations and (in most cases) one or two books in their homes could occasionally speak so descriptively and string a series of adverbs or verbs together to reflect the nuance of a situation. Since the book supposedly reflects the author's roots, I guess it's accurate. But it's hard to believe.

Interestingly (to me), baseball comes through most clearly in the style of the book, in which the narrator's "I'll tell ya what happened" style is somewhat reminiscent of Ring Lardner's baseball books from the early 20th century. However, in this book, the narrator is intelligent and knowledgeable, and he's looking back on his early life, rather than the dull-witted, vain narrator of Lardner's classic "You Know Me, Al." And Ring Lardner does it better.

The view into the life of an alberta youth by kinsella is a one of a kind book. Kinsella wraps you into the culture of the small town in which the novel is based, doing an incomperable job of getting you involved with not only the lead, but every character involved. They way in which Kinsella writes this book, it is as if it wasn't a novel at all, but an autobiography; as if Kinsella had lived through the story. An unparalelled work, I find myself buying a copy of this book every 5 years or so as the binding wears thin from overuse. One that stands alone with a forever reserved spot in my life

I love Bill Kinsella's work. I'm a big fan. In order to get in the groove of this novel you need to experience the pulse of the "Fencepost" short story collections. Even for me "the converted" the constant repitition of various passages, adjective phrases and names began to get tiresome like a folk song with endless refrains which I imagine was the author's point. Jamie, the young narrator gives us the benefit of a child's power of observation. This character is also very sensitive and that is the books redemption. The main plot of the local boy going off to play baseball against real major leaguers represents the pride rural people have when one of their own is or could be successful but the strengths of this story are the subplots. Jamie's attraction to a dirt poor girl and the grief of a German farmer who loses his chance to have a family are two of the best pieces of work I have come across in Kinsella's writings. As usual the character's are vibrant and the exteriors almost three dimensional by description. If you can get into the rhythm of the style the content will be worth the effort.

Without the example of T. R. Pearson's A BRIEF HISTORY OF A SMALL PLACE Kinsella would have had no precedent for the repetitive style he uses in BOX SOCIALS, a novel set in the time and place of his own childhood, west of Edmonton near a place called Darwell in the 1930s--when you were supposed to have a license from the government to turn your radio on!

That he succeeds in telling a baseball tale in a time when he himself knew no baseball and weaves in some truths about the racism that existed in what was, even there, a multi-cultural environment is a tribute to his inventiveness.

This book is best read aloud with a Southern accent. So, if you aren't prepared to "work" at it a bit, you'll probably be disappointed. Otherwise, you'll find yourself noticing the width of the Pembina River-- next time you're on the Edmonton/Jasper highway.

I am a big fan of all of Kinsella's baseball books. This one takes us to 1940's Canada as seen throught the eyes of young Jamie O'Day. We hear about all the eccentric people in Jamie's life including Truckbox Al McClintock, the Little American Soldier, and many other interesting characters of the region. It is always appealing to me how the author revolves his story around baseball. Bob Feller even has a role in the story. My only complaint would be that the way the author repeats names of people and towns throughout the book can be annoying. Box Socials takes us to a time when life was slower and people enjoyed following the small town baseball teams. If you are a baseball fan and enjoy a good story-I think you will have fun reading Box Socials.

I've read this book over and over again and I'm still not tired of it. I was assigned to read this book over the summer by my dad, and loved it! So realistic! I was amazed of how I could relate to Jamie (the main character). One of the Kinsella books more easily found, but at a great price here on Amazon.com. A must-read-right-now book. Once you start, you just can't stop! It's worse than chips! I recommend it to all of my friends

When one picks up a book by W.P. Kinsella one may have a pre-conceived idea of what they are getting into. When that conception is not met exactly, then there is usually a sense of disappointment.
I did not come to BOX SOCIALS from knowing of his Baseball stories, but rather from knowing of his First Nations (he is Cree?) stories - first the short stories and then his "padded" ones that became noveletts.
BOX SOCIALS tries to stride across both cultures. Though I found the voice of the storyteller and the method of the narration delightful and even somewhat intreaguing just to see if the author could maintain it throughout the book, I could see where it might get in the way for some readers.
BOX SOCIALS is not a bout baseball, nor about First Nations citizens, but about growing up in a back-water region that is not unlike what we find in some of our own Southern writers venue. He has populated it with some very intersting characters - all sharpely and clearly drawn. He has painted a picture of the area that is both uplifting and depressing (after all, it is the end of the Great Depression). But above all, he tells a story that is well worth listening to.

WP Kinsella's book "Box Socials" is an excellent insight into the white trash of Alberta. It displays a community kind of like Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," with many well-defined social classes in an area where you're judged by your name. However, the book loses a plot during a Ukranian wedding, and it drudges on to the end.

W.P. Kinsella mixes baseball with small town nostalgia too bake a cake not fit to eat in Box Socials. Kinsella's lure of a promising baseball star, Truckbox Al McClintock, leads readers into believing they are reading a book about baseball, when in fact the sport takes a back seat to the stories and events of everyday people in the Six Towns, a small area in Alberta not even on the map. No one of any significance has ever been produced from the Six Towns and when Truckbox Al hits five homeruns into the Pembina River, one clear across, the town members grow excited that he may bring them fame. In the meantime (about four-fifths of the book), narrator Jamie O'Day takes us on a journey to visit this small town area during World War II, sharing its occurrences along the way.
Box Socials intends to pull the reader in to the nostalgia of small town life in 1940s Alberta with a lack of phones, a one-room schoolhouse, and box socials where box lunches are auctioned off so a boy can share lunch with a girl. However, the routine and regularity of the town soon become redundant and hackneyed. The Bjornsen Brothers play the same music and the widow Beatrice Ann Stevenson repeats the same Emily Dickinson poems at every social affair. Not only does Kinsella repeat in his recounts of the stories, but in his descriptions of the people or events. Every time the baseball game is mentioned, Kinsella finds it necessary to state the Major League team consists of Bob Feller, Hal Newhouser, and Joe DiMaggio himself, a detail that becomes all too annoying.
Truckbox Al's strikeout in the big game reverts the area back to where it started, just the town and its people, no one more famous than anyone else. Box socials are a very appropriate event in the Six Towns because a box lunch is exactly what they are. The box of the area encloses all its people and they share only with each other what is in their box, their hearts, their minds. Although a nice idea, the nostalgia in Box Socials transforms a book about baseball into a book about small town life. Do not be misled,baseball fans, this one is for those desiring to relive the past.