4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Richly written stories with vivid characters . . ., December 13, 2004
This review is from: Blue Spruce: Stories (Paperback)
David Long is one fine writer. His stories are so filled with detail, striking turns of plot, and remarkable, thoroughly believable characters they are almost like novels compressed into just a few pages. In the title story, for instance, two sisters-in-law find themselves living together uncomfortably in a family home now thickly, darkly, and suffocatingly surrounded by spruce trees, which one of them decides to have cut down, with predictable and then quite unexpected results. Long fills in around the story line with incidents from family history, glimpses of other characters, some of them dead and gone. The weather and the seasons are noted in evocative detail. The tone and emotional quality of relationships are conveyed in nuances of behavior and realistic dialogue. You catch your breath at the end of a story, as if returning from a long journey.
Long frequently uses women as central characters. The men in their lives are often just walk-ons, especially those for whom there is a romantic interest. They're regarded from a distance as though opaque and almost incomprehensible. The oldest son of a ranching family loses his emotional bearings, is engulfed by a nameless rage and disappears. A woman looks up her brother, who lives in another state, and discovers that he is strangely enmeshed in a hopeless relationship with a demanding invalid. In another story, a woman rents a house from her employer, who takes an unsettling and ambiguous interest in her. A girl has a crush on a boy who leaves college to carry on an affair with a married high school sweetheart.
The stories are mostly set in a small town west of the Rockies in northwest Montana. Here people live their lives on a kind of battleground between the weight of family histories, the receding promise of the West, extremes of climate, and personal isolation within a limiting and loosely knit social fabric. I recommend this collection of stories to readers interested in the modern-day West, small-town living, complex characters, and emotional truths expressed in super fine writing. I also recommend Long's very enjoyable novel, "The Falling Boy."
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pass it to your Friends -- I did, July 29, 2002
This review is from: Blue Spruce: Stories (Paperback)
I bought "Blue Spruce" in a book sale. Never one for short stories which try to say too much in too short a passage, Long's collection is a fine balance and vastly different. Long's short stories introduce us to characters and lives in small-town America and explores the intricacies in human relations. A keen observer of how people interact with one another, the characters which Long has created reach out from the pages and move you, as if somewhere in your life, you have encountered these same people and have been privy to their thoughts and lives. It was such a good book I felt I had to pass it on and sent one copy to a good friend in America (it's one of those puzzles in modern life where a book printed in Massachusetts get sent back to him from the other end of the world in the post). I look forward to more of Long's offerings.
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