At first glance, a reader might reject In Pinelight. Where are the quotation marks? The paragraph breaks? The punctuation? A few pages into Thomas Rayfiel's sixth novel, however, and the rhythm of the narrator's soliloquy becomes addictive; it feels rude to interrupt his story by closing the book.
Confined to a retirement home, Bill relates the story of his life to an unknown narrator. On the surface, it was an uneventful existence. He never left his village in upstate New York, but change came to him. The narration unfolds in a stream of consciousness: "Brown was handsome in a forward-looking way full of possibilities or so I recall. It could all be colored by what happened subsequently subsequently yes I know my English three and a half years of high school then I had to go to work but Rebecca what on earth are you asking about her for? Of course I know there's a town under there. When they decided to flood the valley no one objected money was hard to come by then."
Bill is a smart man. His stories speak to universal themes as they detail the particulars of life in his little town, the tensions between the educated and the working class, the vacation homes that sprung up for down-state summer people, the friendships, loves and small-town gossip, much of it more sophisticated than one might expect, all of it offering food for thought. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller, Book Passage, San Francisco