Town Smokes

Pinckney Benedict

I've been a big fan of Pinckney Benedict's for some years now, thanks to his first (and, to date, only) novel, Dogs of God. Last year, I tracked down Benedict's newer collection of short stores, The Wrecking Yard, and love it. It took me till now to find his first collection, Town Smokes. And had I not found it, I would have kept looking. Sometimes knowledge is a terrible thing.

Not that this is a bad collection, really. One of the pleasures of finding the first book by any writer one admires is the chance to see the potential shining through the early rough stuff. And Pinckney Benedict radiated potential in 1987. Unfortunately, he also radiated dialect-- if I never see the word "idea" represented as "idee" again, it'll be far too soon. It makes the stories, all too often, a chore more than a pleasure.

Still, the things that make later Benedict so good are all here-- slice-of-life characters in situations that are just outside said slice, whether their own fault or someone else's, reacting to them with the kind of intelligent adaptability one doesn't expect from Benedict's hicks and rednecks (and you have to know that Benedict is using our own stereotypes against us there, which makes it all the better). For the most part, anyway; every once in a while, one of his characters just goes nuts instead (witness the main character in "Hackberry"). That, however, can be just as much fun to watch.

In the general tradition of eighties fiction, a lot of these stories feel unfinished, without purpose; one scene is examined from a much larger picture, and you end the story wondering what happened. "Dog" is a prime example of this; there's the dog, and there's the two guys in the trailer, and there's the subtle shift in their relationship as we go through the story. Yes, I get that that shift is the focus of the story, but is it really enough? Benedict obviously thinks so.

Good, but read his other stuff first.