Book review: Stories that simply ring true

At the core of Laird Hunt's 'Float up, Sing Down — Stories' is a darker story with tragic consequences

Laird Hunt demonstrates no detail is too small or inconsequential to contribute to life-sketches. Picture: Eva Sikelianos Hunt

• Float up, Sing Down — Stories 
• Laird Hunt 
• Riverrun, €14.99 

Laird Hunt is a new name to me, but one that I will be seeking out in future. His last novel,  Zorrie, was a National Book Award finalist in the US, and this intriguing collection of linked stories is also prize-winning material.

Its opening line, “Candy Wilson had forgotten to buy the paprika”, introduces the first of 14 characters, all residents of Bright Creek, Indiana, during the Ronald Reagan years (1981-89), and all living through the same cloudless summer day.

Candy is preparing snacks for a meeting of the Bright Creek Girls Gaming Club. Most of the “girls” are at least 70 years old, and the “gaming” consists of a game of marbles with 25c stakes.

But Candy has to live up to her reputation as hostess, and lay on the usual spread of pigs in a blanket, caramel corn, sunshine salad, and devilled eggs. 

The latter needed paprika, but there was not time for Candy to drive 12 miles to Frankfort, the nearest town, and back before her guests arrived.

The chapter is written as if from within Candy’s lively, humorous mind, introducing us to her everyday life, her friends, her memories and obsessions, until we feel we have always known her.

And so it continues, in the spirit and vernacular of 1980s mid-western American, with the next chapter featuring Turner David who needed to get his zinnias in; then teenage Greg Cullen, who has a “date with destiny”; war veteran Horace Allen who could smell the sea; teenage beauty Della Dorner of the Galaxy Swirl ice cream shop, and her grandfather Hank Dunn, retired sheriff, among others.

Laird Hunt’s total immersion in his characters’ worlds brings these people vividly to life in the reader’s mind, as if in some sleight-of-hand magic trick. 

It works as well with Hank Dunn’s wisdom, gained from a long life of service in this rural backwater, as it does with Toby Slocum, “never the brightest bulb in the box” who had trouble keeping track of his mind, walking his donkey Miss Mack and encountering Gladys Bacon who took long barefoot walks through the cornfields to keep her sane while living with a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD.

The publicity blurb tells us that Hunt is writing “in the tradition of Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson and Elizabeth Strout”. 

Certainly, love of place is a strong motif, but he also demonstrates that no detail is too small or inconsequential to contribute to these life-sketches. They all ring terribly true.

At the core is a darker story with tragic consequences about a much-loved and well-travelled French teacher, Irma Ray, who brought a tantalising glimpse of the world beyond Bright Creek to the mid-west, but was sacked by the vice-principal of the high school who discovered she was having an affair with a woman in Indianapolis.

Even though this is a book about so-called “ordinary people”, it has high ambitions. 

Its epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke spells it out clearly: “There is nothing too small, but my tenderness paints it large on a background of gold.”

What intrigued me was how the author, born in 1968 in Singapore, came to be so familiar with the daily life of 1980s Indiana and its characters. 

It turns out that Hunt’s father was a banker, and he also lived in London and Amsterdam until his parents divorced and sent him to live with his grandmother in Indiana — a woman presumably of the same generation as Candy Wilson who forgot to buy paprika.

If it is first-hand experience that gives his stories such authenticity, it is his literary skills that shape them so seamlessly into such an entertaining and rewarding collection.

BOOKS & MORE

Check out our Books Hub where you will find the latest news, reviews, features, opinions and analysis on all things books from the Irish Examiner's team of specialist writers, columnists and contributors.