Customer Reviews

Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories

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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!

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.