BookBrowse Reviews Eveningland by Michael Knight

BookBrowse:

These stories, told with economy and precision, infused with humor and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward.

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The first thing you notice about Michael Knight's Alabama-based Eveningland is his lovingly gentle writing style that is lyrical without being flowery. Knight imbues the stories within this collection with an attention to landscape and atmosphere that lend them a level of affection, thereby implying his personal relationship with their location. However, I was also struck by how he never allows the setting to overshadow the emotional connection to his characters. In fact, for the most part, these stories are universal enough that they could be located anywhere. Having never been to Alabama, I'm not completely sure if this is wholly positive.

The other thing that you notice about these stories is their endings. Of course I'm not going to give any of them away here, but not all of them actually have concrete conclusions. This isn't a bad thing and, in fact, the feeling of witnessing a cutout section of a character's much bigger life can be very effective. For example, when we come to the end of the story "Our Lady of the Roses" (see Beyond the Book), a story about an art teacher in a Mobile catholic school looking for a way to relieve her feeling that life is suffocating her, although everything is still up in the air for her, there's also an overwhelming sense of renewal and hopefulness. This slice of life technique works best when Knight keeps his cast of characters to a minimum, which he holds to in almost all these stories. With only a few characters, we can focus our imaginations on how the events we witness might play out after the story is over. The one exception is "Landfall", a story about how a horrible hurricane approaching the Alabama coastline is a metaphor for one family and the effect it has on them, where I felt that the multiple characters swirling around each other were an interesting parallel to the hurricane at the center of the events. On the other hand, that same multitude of loose ends was, for me, unnerving, and I found that particular story less than satisfactory.

As I said, the universality of this collection might not have worked completely in Knight's favor. When reading fiction, I sometimes want to be transported to a place I've never been before, and unfortunately, most of these stories didn't do that for me. Despite this, I truly appreciated how clever some of them are, and how interesting the characters are too. I also liked the use of the second person voice that Knight employs in "Grand Old Party." Using an unconventional mechanic like this is a risk few writers take, but he pulls it off perfectly, and that was a real treat. All of this means that despite a few small drawbacks, I believe Knight shows us a true mastery of the short story form with Eveningland, and I certainly recommend it.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in April 2017, and has been updated for the April 2018 edition. Click here to go to this issue.