Leah, New Hampshire: The Collected Stories of Thomas Williams (A Graywolf Discovery) - Softcover

The late Williams, National Book Award winner (The Hair of Harold Roux, 1978), is here well served with a collection of 15 stories--precise acts of attention, rich with detail of New Hampshire, of family relationships, and conflicts between ordinary people, and often concerned with hunting and fishing. Many originally appeared in The New Yorker and Esquire; most were written in the 50's and 60's. Some of the best include ``The Snows of Minnesota,'' about a boy in the fifth grade forced to move with his parents from Minnesota to New Hampshire. After a snowstorm, the boy builds a secret snow fort with a series of tunnels and becomes traumatized when it's destroyed--in a lyrical finish, the sensitive father understands: ``He was trying to make Duluth.'' ``The Voyage of the Cosmogon,'' likewise, concerns a relocated eighth-grader who escapes from a suicidal mother having an affair with a married cop by creating a fantasy life related to a TV program. As in many of the pieces here, the ending is breathtaking: the mother decides against suicide only because there's something, maybe not love, between herself and her son--``a small thing among the thoughtless cruelties of the universe.'' ``Goose Pond'' is about a 56-year-old man who faces his wife's death by killing a deer with a bow and arrow, and who finally contents himself with ``the dangerous journey down the world.'' ``The Skier's Progress'' gives comeuppance to a local ski hero, while ``The Old Dancers'' lyrically elbows an elderly couple, both married for the second time, to live through the wife's illness and discover a love stronger than habit. ``Certainties,'' another hunting story, laments that ``There are few dark places left on our maps....'' John Irving introduces this collection, one of the most powerful of the year. With any luck, it will lead readers to rediscover Williams's novels. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In his introduction to this posthumous collection of short stories by his former teacher and National Book Award Winner ( The Hair of Harold Roux , LJ 6/1/74), John Irving calls Williams "very much a New Hampshire man." With his simple but eloquent prose, Williams indeed exhibits great sympathy for the people and land of his adopted state. But even more, he understands the fragility of life, its deep sorrows, its enduring beauty and richness. Perhaps the author himself puts it best in the story of "Horned Pouts Are Evil": "The closer we get to nature . . . the more we recognize ourselves as part of its infinite patience, its cruelty and beauty. Without the knowledge of danger, how can we aspire to be alive? We must keep our senses quivering." Williams's heroes and heroines are, above all else, survivors, people who through a sense of loss come to understand, consciously or unconsciously, this great truth. Most of these 15 stories first appeared in Esquire or The New Yorker in the Fifties and Sixties. It is good, at last, to have them all in one place. An excellent choice for any public or academic library.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.