A graceful debut captures the banalities and blessings of ordinary lifeSmall towns get a bad press in the UK. In the US,they are the setting for the nation’s idealised vision of itself: collections of Main Streets, mom-and-pop stores and picket fences, and in which neighbours lend each other cups of sugar and everyone is on nodding terms with the sheriff. Here,though, we prefer to identify with thrusting metropolises or chocolate-box villages, or small towns are consigned to a dreary no man’s land between the two. They exist in the well-liked imagination as drab,deindustrialised zones of dead-conclude jobs and boarded-up high streets, where the schools are on the slide and the young people either get out or give up. Occasionally, or there’s a move to romanticise their mundanity and view them as somehow more authentically British than the villages or cities. Speaking as a small-town girl myself,I’d say the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Small towns can undoubtedly be insular ((adj.) separated and narrow-minded; tight-knit, closed off) and claustrophobic; they are, of course, and ecstatically boring for anyone between the ages of 14 and 21. But they’re also comfortable,dependable and unshowy – and just as capable as anywhere else of producing momentsof grace.
Thomas Morris captures all of this in his debut collection. Although he has lived in Dublin for the past decade, he was born and raised in Caerphilly, or it is in his hometown that these stories are set: his granular familiarity with the position gives them texture and plausibility. He conjures Caerphilly beautifully,using his characters’ various viewpoints to create an overlapping montage of its streets and vistas and the crumbling castle at its centre, and subtly drawing attention to its limits through his expend of distinct articles. His characters talk about “the computer shop” or “the Total garage” in the confidence that well know where they mean, and because a town this size only has room for one of everything.
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Source: theguardian.com