Grasshopper Falls

From poet and storywriter Gilfillan (Sworn Before Cranes, 1994), more story-sketches—or sketch-stories—with tone, texture, and detail that keep them invariably interesting and humane.
A young boy's uncle "has" him for the summer ("Uncle and Shrike") and takes the boy on a car trip from Wyoming toward Indiana and Ohio, where the uncle's ancestors are buried. The two don't make it that far, but little matter; they stay in camps while the uncle reads Thomas Wolfe and John Ruskin—and gravely worries this good-hearted boy by edging closer and closer to senility. Gilfillan's pieces may have no "endings" as such, but they can hit pay dirt with "non-ending-endings," as in the title story, when, after the discovery of a nameless old man, a boy of 15 thinks back in a gorgeously symbolic moment to his grandfather, a famous bronco hand before WWI. Like other pieces, "Men in Shadow" (old Montana men sit in a perfect shady spot through a summer day) allows Gilfillan to show his considerable gift as a raconteur, seamlessly wrapping together tales of a present-day (1988) small town, of WWII, and of 1928—when a man killed another to protect his wife's dignity. Time after time in these 15 stories Gilfillan offers snippets of life in Montana or the Dakotas that are as homemade and unpretentious as, say, Garrison Keillor's people are in his sketches—though Gilfillan's work steers masterfully clear of the sugary traces that can muddle Keillor's. All pieces don't work equally well—satires of outsiders, for example, like "Cold Hands, High Water," or the faintly tendentious "A Missouri Story," about brutality toward honest hobos around 1902. But far the most are steady-eyed, fine, and always interesting, from "Pie for Breakfast" on through the wonderfully seriocomic "One Summer by the River."
"Regionalism" that shows what honest, true writing is—and what it can do.