Box Socials (1991)

This is a pretty good set of stories depicting life in small rural communities during the Depression and early 1940s, unfortunately marred for me by some authorial tics, like repeating endlessly tag lines and adjectival clauses that weren't all that great the first time around. All in all, however, I liked and appreciated the way Kinsella hangs character studies and compassion on a baseball frame. ( )

My first Kinsella, read in 1998.
I had to re-read the first chapter, since I was busy paying attention to the run-on sentences the first time through, I lost the meaning.
A look at life on the Prairies in the '40s - non-idealized, I think.
Well worth the read. ( )

An offbeat humorour telling of recollections by Jamie O'Day about life in rural Alberta, Canada in the 1940's, this is a set of mostly comic pieces about the denizens of his childhood at a time when the major sports were baseball, fighting and furtive sex, mostly told via a background of box socials, a country tradition in which the girls and women would each make box lunches, to be bid upon by the boys and men, with the winners getting to share the lunch with the lady who made them. The story is uneven but frequently hilarious, marred by Kinsella's choice to frequently repeat the same descriptive phrase throughout the story, kind of like Arlo Guthrie in "Alice's Restaurant" ("...with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one..."). But the whole book is partly redeemed by a poignant and heartbreaking bit about Jamie O'Day's own box social, and is easily the best part of the book. The rest is amusing and diverting, but that's about it. ( )

I'm normally a big fan of Kinsella's work, but this book was very difficult to stay with. It's set up with the premise of "Truckbox" Al McClintock facing Bob Feller, but almost everything leading to that moment seems inconsequential to the premise.

Mostly a collection of funny little incidents and anecdotes, but as a novel it didn't work well for me. ( )