This book is a collection of 13 short stories about the residents of the Granite State trailerpark. The setting is in a small town in New England in 1980's. The trailerpark is home to various eccentric residents whose vastly different lives are told are told in each short story. 11 of these stories are 10-20 pages long, while the first and last story are each about 50 pages (those two short stories just happened to be my favorite and they are the reason why I chose to give the book 4, instead of 3 stars).There is a quote on page 260 that I feel describes the characters in this book very well:It's true of trailerpark that the people who live there are generally alone at the center of their lives. They are widows and widowers, divorcees and bachelors and retired army officers, a black man in a white society, a black woman there too, a drug dealer, a solitary child of a broken home, a drunk, a homosexual in a heterosexual society - all of them, man and woman, adult and child, basically alone in the world.Although most of the stories are average, the first and last one are really really good and worth reading. The first is the "Guinea Pig Lady" story and it is about a middle-aged frumpy lady named Flora Pease. Flora can be described as crazy by some people: her inappropriate style of clothing (wearing long winter coat in the summer, no shoes, etc.) and loud, boisterous singing is a deterrent in her finding friends and having a healthy social life. The park's residents stay away from her, until the realize that there is something unusual going on in her home. Flora is hoarding hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer! At first, the hobby is merely amusing, but when her whole trailer starts getting crammed with cages and a pile of feces behind her home reaches a staggering height, people start getting worried about Flora and her sanity. No one can figure out the best way to fix Flora and rid the park of the guinea pigs at the same time. The other story that I liked very much was "The Fisherman," which is about an elderly man named Merle Ring. Merle's favorite winter pastime is ice-fishing. This is his passion and his main activity during the brutally cold winter months. Everything is going well for Merle until he wins a large amount of money from a lottery. He decides to keep the money in a box and not spend it, preferring to fish and drink whisky instead as if nothing incredible has happened to him. His neighbors, however, have other plans. Each person can't help but imagine what that much money can do to change his/her life. The people talk about the money constantly and are soon infuriated with Merle for not spending it and/or loaning some of the money to them. The people's jealousy and avarice grows to such astronomical proportions that it culminates in a single very shameful action that nobody ever forgets again.
I had a difficult time with Bank’s style in this one, primarily his lack of sentence variety: he stuck with long complex sentence types. I liked the premise of the linked stories, using the trailerpark as the linking device. I liked the way the two longer stories, the first and the last in the collection, each contained all of the characters, and how each contained an absurd and humorous situation that demanded all of the characters interact. I also liked that most of the other stories did not take place at the trailerpark. They concerned themselves with revealing something about the characters who lived in the trailerpark, but not necessarily events that were taking place at the trailerpark, or even contemporaneous with the time that the characters were living there. This technique gave Banks a lot of freedom to explore the characters without having to do so within the context of their present circumstance (something he does in the two bookend stories). I liked the cumulative effect of the collection; it ended up feeling like a novel. I didn’t think many of the stories were that powerful on their own, the resolutions didn’t seem that strong, the entry points into the stories were not as compelling, and he stuck with the same style throughout.
What do You think about Trailerpark (1998)?
I seem to have abandoned this book for the time being. I'll probably pick it up again some day.UPDATE: I finally finished reading this one. This book consists of several short stories which are related to each other through a series of characters who live (or have lived) at a trailer park in small town New Hampshire. I didn’t enjoy them all that much. I think they were supposed to teach me about human nature, but I found it difficult to feel connected to any of the characters. I just didn’t care much about any of them. I found it very easy to just put the book down and forget about it. Oh well.
—HeavyReader
It's a collection of short stories set in rural New Hampshire. Each story stands alone; together they examine the characters of the trailer park in a wild variety of episodes."Very few people who have qualifications for such specialized work as nursing are willing to live in a small mill town like Catamount, a town that has been dying for a half-century, a town where the poor are not only always with you but where annually they seem to increase in geometric proportion to the rich." from God's Country
—Linda
My favorite Russell Banks book. I love interconnected short stories, and this is a prize bunch about the very diverse, very human residents of a trailer park (which Banks uses as one word--trailerpark). Numerous plotlines, dramas, and small details such as the observations of the characters' gestures, thoughts, and actions resonate with truth...extremely funny in places as well...it seems like every good, bad, ugly, and previously unsung character at one end of the American dream is in this book: pot smokers, animal hoarders, young lovers, lottery winners, children, jealous spouses, hardworking single moms, responsible siblings, lonely older people, the works. A great read for lovers of character pieces.
—Indra
