Customer Reviews

The Smallest People Alive

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These short stories are unlike anything I've read before. To me, they are so true to life the words practically burn off the page. Keith Banner illuminates and makes art out of the lives of rural, small town, and small city gay people, and of those whose lives intersect with them. Some characters are so deeply flawed they are repugnant; others evoke nothing but respect and understanding. These stories are funny, pitiful, and harrowing. I hope at least a few of Banner's stories make their rightful place alongside those of the esteemed Flannery O'Connor, Mary Hood, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joy Williams.

This is an extraordinary book that finds its truths and lyricism in lives that seem to offer almost nothing. The stories are peopled by the clinically obese, retards, workers in dead-end jobs, the lonely, the handicapped: the smallest people alive. What's more, they're wise and self-aware enough to know who they are and how little they're owed. What saves them is love, or the possibility of it, of crumbs from love's table. Most of the stories deal with gay men or boys, but that should exclude no one from their power and, often, humour. I was touched and amused, and deeply impressed, by Banner's capacity to make the world he describes not only real but of value. I can't wait to read more.

Banner's prose is simple but lyrical. His characters are all flawed. They live in squalor, battering into one another in a drug-fueled, lonely desperation. They fight, snarl, once in a while try to help one another. The stories here are very rich with characterization (everything from an oxygen-tank reliant man thinking of offfing his sad, sickly wife, to a woman who must care for mentally challenged people, to a gay man whose friend from out of town ends up getting a bit frisky. There is a lot of sex and some of it quite strange. The descriptions are sizzling and often very fluid. There are some typos, which I found annoying (especially when one of the stories is misspelled, that is just shoddy copy-editing! "What we at after the wedding" instead of "what we ATE" come on!) Otherwise there is a lot to like here if you appreciate southern ohio lit ala Pollock. This is not quite as brutal as say Knockemstiff, but it is equally masterful in its depiction of squalor and the kind of grueling, half-sentiment squeezed in bitter drops from the lives of the downtrodden, inexplicable hope abounds.