At Close Range
- ISBN-10
- ISBN-13
- 9798624186484
- Series
- At Close Range
- Pages
- 282
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-03-12
- Author
- F. Hopkinson Smith
Description
We cannot recall having read any of Mr. Hopkinson Smith's stories before, and if this is a "first book" it is one of such exceptional promise as will make us look out for its successors with interest. There are nine short stories in the volume, and the short story we are told is somewhat out of favor with the generality of readers, so that the author comes forward with a more or less discredited form of fiction. His method as here exemplified is better fitted for the short story, the sketch, the "thing seen", than for a sustained work of fiction, though of course it may well be that he can also apply it to the fuller work. His theory is "that at the bottom of every heart-crucible choked with life's cinders there can almost always be found a drop of gold", and that theory is well illustrated in his rendering of these nine stories of life seen "at close range". The stories are of American life--several of them of life on the trains, or on the road as that term is understood by the commercial traveler, and these, perhaps, have rather more grip about them than those which take the reader abroad. The author, who writes tersely and well, shows that he has keen powers of observation, he is also endowed with a sense of humor and a capacity for sympathy, he can in a measure touch, as it has been said, both the springs of laughter and the source of tears, and these capacities combine to make him a welcome accession to the ranks of our storytellers.--The Saturday Review, Vol. 100.
