Box Socials by W.P. Kinsella Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Box Socials
Book Review: Repetition overwhelms occasional humor
Summary: 2 Stars
I picked this book up in the Sports Section of my local library, and I was ready for a good baseball yarn during my beach vacation. Well, baseball is barely incidental to this story of a few defining moments in the lives of people living in rural Alberta, Canada, during WWII.
The narrator, who is presumably an adult by the time he writes the book, tells about events that occurred when he was probably 10 or 12 years old. He's old enough to notice some things, but young enough to not quite understand everything. For example, he can tell that boys like girls, and that it has something to do with rubbing together, but he doesn't really have a "fix" on what it is at the time. And he's gradually becoming aware that the people of the six rural villages that make up the region will gossip behind each other's backs, even as they go to extraordinary lengths to help each other overcome poverty, poor crop cycles, and bitter winters.
The book evocatively takes you to that place and era of hard-to-imagine hardship. As you sink into that world, you think affectionately about the characters, but you also thank your stars that you don't have to live such a tough life or in a place where everyone knows your business so well. If anything, it gets kind of tedious to try to keep track of all these people with the same last name and uncertain familial relations.
The narrator ostensibly is going to tell the story of Truckbox Al McClintock, a strapping teenager who is the best home-run hitter in the area, and who gets to play in an all-star game against American pros who are touring as part of the war effort. But in getting to that story, the narrator diverges to tell tales about his life and the lives of the people he knows. He tells about box socials (dances where women or girls elaborately decorate box lunches, which are auctioned to eager boys who get to eat with the designer of the box), drink-fests for every occasion, and other socializing in town. In fact, socializing is the only activity that people could afford to do when taking a break from farming, fishing or hunting for survival. Times were hard, and the book does a great job of obliquely reminding the reader every so often that people were surviving winters of 20-below-zero in log cabins heated by single stoves.
The problem with the book is that the style is highly repetitive. The author repeats stock phrases over and over, as a device to mimic how an entertaining storyteller might operate in-person. But this isn't in-person; it's a book. I started skipping those phrases, which sometimes would come up on 3-4 pages in a row. Quite literally, 10% of the book could be eliminated simply by cutting the redundancies, and the book would be better. The charm of those turns of phrase -- "skinny Indian pitcher named Eddie Grassfires, whose only saving grace was a passable pickoff move to first base," "chokecherry wine, dandelion wine, raisin wine, blackberry wine, homemade beer, and Healthen's rapture, or plain old bring-on-blindness, logging-boot-to-the-side-of-the-head homebrew" -- wears thin after 10 times.
Also, the author doesn't explain how these people with minimal educations and (in most cases) one or two books in their homes could occasionally speak so descriptively and string a series of adverbs or verbs together to reflect the nuance of a situation. Since the book supposedly reflects the author's roots, I guess it's accurate. But it's hard to believe.
Interestingly (to me), baseball comes through most clearly in the style of the book, in which the narrator's "I'll tell ya what happened" style is somewhat reminiscent of Ring Lardner's baseball books from the early 20th century. However, in this book, the narrator is intelligent and knowledgeable, and he's looking back on his early life, rather than the dull-witted, vain narrator of Lardner's classic "You Know Me, Al." And Ring Lardner does it better.
Book Review: simply astounding
Summary: 5 Stars
The view into the life of an alberta youth by kinsella is a one of a kind book. Kinsella wraps you into the culture of the small town in which the novel is based, doing an incomperable job of getting you involved with not only the lead, but every character involved. They way in which Kinsella writes this book, it is as if it wasn't a novel at all, but an autobiography; as if Kinsella had lived through the story. An unparalelled work, I find myself buying a copy of this book every 5 years or so as the binding wears thin from overuse. One that stands alone with a forever reserved spot in my life
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