Box Socials [Mass Market Paperback]

W.P. Kinsella (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 27, 1994

Here's the story of how Truckbox Al McClintock, a small-town greaser whose claim to fame was hitting a baseball clean across the Pembina River, almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals -- but instead ended up batting against Bob Feller of Cleveland Indian Fame in Renfrew Park, Edmonton, Alberta.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kinsella, whose classic Shoeless Joe found another incarnation in the movie Field of Dreams , evokes the atmosphere of small-town ball fields and other aspects of rural life in this colorful, comic reminiscence of multi-ethnic farm society in Depression-era Canada. Purporting to tell "the story of how Truckbox Al McClintock almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League," narrator Jamie O'Day leads the reader on a rambling tour of the rural Alberta hamlets near which he and Truckbox grew up, the closest being a town called Fark. Inheriting storytelling talent from his father, a transplanted South Carolina carpenter whom he often quotes, Jamie also passes along insights picked up while eavesdropping on the gossip meetings of the "Fark Female Farmerettes." With humor and tenderness Kinsella evokes the social rites of the Norwegian-, German-, Ukrainian- and English-speaking hillbillies, their courtships and heartbreaks, fistfights and philanderings, through a series of weddings, dances, whist drives and box socials. Jamie's teenage memories poke gentle fun at small-town society and at adulthood itself while still celebrating his coming-of-age--the real story here, despite Truckbox McClintock's brush with athletic fame.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

YA-- A story about rural life in Alberta, Canada in the 1940s. Here, people must rely on one another for almost all aspects of their daily lives, despite their ethnic diversity and foibles. Kinsella shows how they react to their neighbors' indiscretions, to cultural differences, and to the strengths and weaknesses of individual members of their communities. He adeptly captures the special flavor of small-town life, where everyone knows everyone else's business, and the pace of life before the communication explosion. This includes the social aspects, such as the auctioning of lunches at ``box socials.'' A baseball theme weaves a common thread through the lives of the characters. The author uses an unusual, repetitive style of writing; at times he begins almost every paragraph in certain sections with the same words, or repeats entire phrases or sentences, using them as adjectives modifying some new piece of information. While some readers might find it annoying, others will be amused. The book also gives good insight into the history of a specific area of North America during the time of mass European immigration and societal integration.
- Rose Calio, R . E . Lee High School, Springfield, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Random House Value Publishing (June 27, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 051712808X
• ISBN-13: 978-0517128084
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,971,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Called Strike, November 24, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Box Socials (Hardcover)

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

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Repetition overwhelms occasional humor, August 28, 2010

By 

Avid Reader (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Box Socials (Paperback)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars simply astounding, August 27, 2001

By 

"shutupweenie" (N. Las Vegas, NV) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Box Socials (Paperback)

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