One can perhaps best hear the wheels clicking behind the voice of the unnamed coastal Ireland narrator of Claire-Louise Bennet's intriguing collection of stories in the opening to "Control Knobs": "When I first moved in here all three control knobs on the cooker were intact and working just fine. Three control knobs on a cooker doesn't sound like very many to most people because, nowadays, in addition to hardly anyone ever saying nowadays, very few people own what's known as a mini-kitchen, and those people who do are probably the same people who continue to unfurl the phrase nowadays."
Pond, in its quirky structure and language, calls to mind the Irish fathers of literary modernism Joyce and Beckett. But then it also echoes Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Carroll's Alice, Thoreau's Walden and, more contemporarily, Strout's Olive Kitteridge, as well as anything by Nicholson Baker.
Bennett's narrator is a funny, self-deprecating, observant, opinionated, earthy woman whose mind grasps every detailed string of her rural life and gives it a pull to reveal her curiosity and contented solitude. Nothing is missed: her neighbors, her garden and compost heap, a new bicycle, local cows and dogs, the mailbox. What a treasure, this woman!
In the short two-page concluding story, Bennett abruptly shifts to the third person, as if needing to collect herself and step back from such deep immersion into the soul of the narrator. After closing this collection, readers may also want to step back and absorb all that burbles along in Pond so enjoyably--even though the narrator elsewhere advises: "It's a devil to know what to take seriously." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.