Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories [Hardcover]

Donald Hall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 7, 2003

Willow Temple, combining six of the most "notable and moving stories" (Robert Taylor, Boston Globe) from the 1987 collection The Ideal Bakery with six new stories written in the years since, is Donald Hall's most important short fiction collection to date. "From Willow Temple" is the indelible story of a child's witness of her mother's adultery and of the earlier shocking loss that underlies it. The other stories, too, are reminiscent of Alice Munro and William Maxwell in their mastery of form, their deeply observed portrayals of the interior worlds of only children, and their ability to trace the emotional fault lines connecting generations. In three stories we see David Bardo at crucial junctures of his life, beginning as a child drawn to his parents' "cozy adult coven of drunks" and growing into a young man whose intense first affair undergirds a lifelong taste for the heady mix of ardor and betrayal. Hall's short stories give a "breathtakingly successful" (Chicago Tribune) account of the passionate weight of lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Celebrated poet and essayist Hall maintains the restrained, elegant style that established him as a master of his craft in the 1987 collection The Ideal Bakery, adding seven new stories to the five entries from the earlier collection. The title story sets the tone as a woman narrates her childhood memories of witnessing her mother's infidelity with a farm worker on their Ohio farm, an incident that led to her divorce from the girl's father, a distant classics teacher. "The First Woman" offers an equally painful take on the aftermath of love when a chronic womanizer reencounters his first conquest, who exposes the emptiness of his life after he inadvertently insults her during their reunion. New England figures prominently as a setting in several stories: "New England Primer" is a multilayered account of a man's generational ties to his family and upbringing, while "Widowers' Woods" is an evocative account of a man's memories of his time with his late wife, recalled as he walks through the woods near their former home. The only recurring character is David Bardo, who turns up in more than one entry-most notably in "Roast Suckling Pig," as he embarks on a long-term, problematic affair with a duplicitous woman named Alma Trust. Hall can be a bit distant in his narrative approach, but his ability to maintain continuity while weaving together complex story lines remains superb, and his judicious use of irony is always effective. The consistently elegiac tone fixes the collection on a single emotional note, but this is a first-rate work by an author whose control over the tools of his genre is impeccable.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hall's latest book is a selection of 12 short stories, five of which were previously published in the 1987 collection The Ideal Bakery. Of the remaining seven stories, six are collected here for the first time and one is new. The stories vary in length and theme; some examine long spans of the characters' lives and others provide a short glimpse into one event. In "From Willow Temple," a daughter tells how her beautiful mother's faithlessness damages their family. "The Fifth Box" is a brief snapshot of a man's violent grief. There is also a trio of stories ("The Accident," "Lake Paradise," and "Roast Suckling Pig") about David Bardo, following him from innocent young teen to adulterous thirtysomething. Threads of longing for a simpler past weave through many of the stories, while all are enlivened by Hall's sharp perception of the vagaries of human nature, by his spare and lyrical prose, and by the occasional shocks of irony, humor, and the unexpected. This masterful collection will appeal to readers of literary fiction as well as short story fans. Ellen Loughran
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618329811
• ISBN-13: 978-0618329816
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,848,003 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Elegant short story collection, July 2, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories (Hardcover)

Sometimes at the end of a short story, I go `huh?' and turn the page, thinking surely there must be more. Not so with Willow Temple. Most of these stories, examining the myriad repercussions of brief moments in time, leave readers with a satisfying sense of completion. Many of them focus on a sense of longing for the simple times of the past years, and the prose, while spare and focused, is at the same time lyrical and evocative.
A good find. Fans of literary fiction should love it. Those who aren't, won't!

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tender yet unflinchingly real stories of Americana, June 10, 2003

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories (Hardcover)

Donald Hall is a fine, intelligent craftsman of a writer. He knows how to distill volumes into a few pages, how to inform his reader about the spectrum of life from which he plucks his characters with a minimalism that in other hands would create a cold if not frigid climate. Hall is to short stories what Charles Ives and John Adams and Aaron Copeland are to music, Richard Russo and E.L. Doctorow and E. Annie Proulx are to novels: he has found the six senses in American life and weaves them into tapestries like few others. There is a bit of Robert Frost, of Walt Whitman, of Wallace Stevens and of William Carlos Wiliams here, and their presence is honored and hallowed.

Donald Hall is concerned with the cycle of life, not only the reverent form, but also the rocks and boulders that our lives encounter. He is able to speak in the voices of children and adults as narrators, wades through the toxicity of alcoholic parents, the foibles of those that have and those that have not, deals with the cold reality of dying and its aftermath on the living, and yet is able through his incredible gifts with words to make elegies and songs, instead of eulogies and bleatings. These stories are brief in pages, nearly all of them have the terse no-nonsense New England psycheand stoicism, and yet each story brings a desire to sit and cogitate, assuring ourselves we will not forget the folks we've just met. Read and weep, read and chuckle, but by all means .... read.