Though billed as a short story collection, Nonesuch
Chronicles by Woodlands author Bill Barnes, is really a novel in short
chapters that explores the life and death of a small west Texas town that
blossomed with the oil boom and was reclaimed by the desert when its residents
went in search of more prosperous venues after the bust. Throughout these twenty-one brief tales—the longest
is ten pages—Barnes’ voice is uniquely West Texas. Some of the stories are
tall tales where the author winks and grins through his words as he spins his
yarn, his tongue pressed firmly against his cheek. Many of his characters are
born liars who try to outdo each other with fantastic and unbelievable tales of
their glory days. In “The Great Christmas Fruitcake Shootout,” the mythical
town of Nonesuch celebrates the season with a unique but misguided solution to
the problem of what to do with all those old fruitcakes. Havoc ensues. At times, readers may wonder if Barnes is merely leading
them down a meandering country road of reminiscence as he spins a tale that
doesn’t seem to have a point. Usually, though, Barnes has a surprise in store
at the end as he adeptly ties together seemingly disparate threads in unexpected
ways. In the span of a mere six pages, “A Handful of
Dimes” recounts how his fictionalized father was given a job in a new pharmacy
only to discover that his real task was to groom the owner’s son to take his
place. The story hops to another scene in which local thugs convince his father—now running his own pharmacy—to stop selling medicinal alcohol because
he was competing with their bootlegging business. Another jump and the story tells about how a group of
itinerant workers buy out the pharmacy’s supply of suitcases and radios, then
fill the suitcases with Popsicles, intending to ship them back home to their
families. In the closing two pages, the narrator is an adult revisiting his
childhood home, now mostly abandoned. In a skillful act of legerdemain, Barnes
ties these isolated anecdotes together into a story with a surprise ending. Barnes shifts point of view from story to story, often
showing events through the eyes of his surrogate self at various periods in his
life, sometimes narrating in third person, but also relating events from the
point of view of his father or other of the town’s citizens or passers by.
Characters reappear in numerous stories, the colorful politicians and
businesspeople who populate any small, nosy community. Children grow into adults
and die. Wars come and go, as does the oil, or the promise of it. Two stories have been previously published in the Texas
magazine Sunday supplement of the Houston Chronicle. This reviewer has been
exposed to many of them through critique sessions at the Woodlands Writers
Guild. On one memorable occasion, an e-mail request for assistance went out from
the author to the membership, wondering how long a cat might survive without
food or water. Readers will discover the reason behind this request within one
of the Nonesuch Chronicles. Sometimes the language is rough around the edges, the
argot of oil workers and uneducated people, but this lends a verisimilitude to
these tales that is harder to achieve than readers might realize. Barnes knows
whereof he speaks and this first book-length work shows his love for the people
who influenced his early life, all of whom he has reassembled in a little West
Texas whistle stop called Nonesuch. Web site and all contents © Copyright Bev Vincent 2023. All rights reserved. |
|
