Synopsis
Willow Temple, combining six of the most "notable and moving stories" (Robert Taylor, Boston Globe) from the 1987 collection The Ideal Bakery with six new stories written in the years since, is Donald Hall's most important short fiction collection to date. "From Willow Temple" is the indelible story of a child's witness of her mother's adultery and of the earlier shocking loss that underlies it. The other stories, too, are reminiscent of Alice Munro and William Maxwell in their mastery of form, their deeply observed portrayals of the interior worlds of only children, and their ability to trace the emotional fault lines connecting generations. In three stories we see David Bardo at crucial junctures of his life, beginning as a child drawn to his parents' "cozy adult coven of drunks" and growing into a young man whose intense first affair undergirds a lifelong taste for the heady mix of ardor and betrayal. Hall's short stories give a "breathtakingly successful" (Chicago Tribune) account of the passionate weight of lives.
The New York Times
For most of the characters in Donald Hall's stories -- and that would include the New England countryside -- happiness is something experienced long ago. If you want to call it happiness: more like communion and contentment as prelude to suffering. This is Hall's territory, as readers of his poetry already know -- an anti-postcard of caved-in farmhouses, abandoned mills and people who stumble from promise into tragedy. Like Thomas Hardy, another rural poet who wrote downer fiction, Hall balances on sorrow's edge by virtue of an old-fashioned rigor; he never slips into self-pity on one side or sentimentality over the past on the other. — Matthew Flamm