THE TURNING, by Tim Winton; Scribner, 317 pages, $25.
Tim Winton's new short-story collection is subtle, well-crafted and touching. He writes of growing up in a blue-collar town in Western Australia. Some of the stories are set in the 1970s, some in the present.
We meet the same characters at different stages of their lives, in different settings. Some escape their town. Others leave but are marked by the cruelty as well as by the kindness they knew when they were young.
As in real life, these stories are replete with unanswered questions. Parents run off. Someone is dealing drugs. Relatives who haven't spoken in years, suddenly call.
The men of the town work in meatpacking plants or on fishing boats. They get drunk (they have their reasons). The women are depressed; some of them. The families in these stories live close to nature, but far from paradise.
In a story called "The Long Clear View," Winton writes of the family of the town's cop. They are, for a short time only, the town's happiest folks:
"When the old man gets a weekend off, he drives you all out to a salmon camp along the coast where you set up in an empty tin hut with a box of groceries and some sleeping bags. The autumn air is cool and salty, spiced with the tang of peppermint trees which spill down the dune to the empty beach. Together you catch herring from the stony headland and sit out by a bonfire telling jokes. Your mother is bright and girlish. Your father's quiet laugh makes you sleepy, and in the morning you mind your sister while the oldies walk the beach hand in hand. Before they return the baby has taken her first unaided steps and only you're there to see it.
"The night you get back to town you wake to the scream of sirens. Lights crawl the wall and the phone rings in the hallway. From the kitchen window, you see the school in flames. The old man is out the door and you're left there in a fizz of excitement you're careful to conceal from your mother."
Winton's tales do not glamorize small town life or Australia. They do reflect well on the craft of short-story writing.
Each story is complete and yet they come together, gently but surely, into a brilliant whole. Winton was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. To read him is to see why.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com