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Beach Town: Stories
Shift whistles at the soap factory and the shipyard, along with the changing tides, mark the rhythms of life in the beach town. This is a world of fast food, double dates, and Saturday morning haircuts at the barber shop-a world as seemingly uncomplicated as a summer night's ride on a carousel. A lonely girl from "away" seeks connection with high school classmates who give no notice; a harried salesman confronts his deepest fear; a middle-aged woman reckons with unfulfilled dreams; and a man returns for a class reunion and finds himself face to face with something beyond his imagining. In Beach Town, David Daniel recreates the seaside town of North Weybridge, recalling in stories poignant and sometimes mysterious, the loves and losses, the magic and hard realities of clam diggers, sailors, barmaids and disillusioned lovers, characters revealed in moments of crisis or enlightenment.
224 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 10, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 18, 2023
David Daniel has mastered the written word. His sentences can negotiate any terrain, from love, to innocence, to surprise, to tension, anger, disgust—you name it. You’ll be reading a paragraph, not even noticing the hidden triggers, springs, and wires just beneath the surface. But then you reach the end, and the thing goes off in your face. He understands the shape each story requires to make the most of the energy traveling through it—when and how to speed up the prose and to slow it.
He’s got similes down (as well as humor). On page 44, we read: “He was stooped now, wearing suspenders that looped around a potbelly like parentheses.” And insights: “But at eighteen, danger is a distant land.” Mood: “Behind and ahead the road lay dark, ghosted by the fog gliding along the pavement, smooth as the whisper of a knife.” Opening lines: “He loved all three of her noses.”
Many of these stories deal with the class system in small, American towns. They expose the way it is so pronounced and yet so invisible. In no story is that more true than “Roons,” which near the end of the book comes in at 70 pages, meeting the length criterion of a novella.
Some of these stories are incredibly clever. Often when people write clever stories, they seem to think cleverness is all a story requires. I’ve always felt Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Lottery,” comes dangerously close to that, though she somehow pulls it off. But when Mr. Daniel comes up with a clever story, he’s not satisfied to let the form of the story carry the weight. He puts in the same sort of work on other aspects of the story (e.g., dialogue, character development, specific details concerning setting and the passage of time, sensory details that invite the reader into the story, etc.), that he puts into stories for which the form plays a less important role. My favorite of those stories, and one of my favorites in the entire collection, is “Ship in a Bottle,” which takes place late on a rainy night in a restaurant by a harbor.
In fact, as the title implies, all of these stories take place by the sea. Some are narrated in the first person by an adult looking back on his childhood or youth. In others, the narrator is nearly invisible. But they all have something to offer.
He’s got similes down (as well as humor). On page 44, we read: “He was stooped now, wearing suspenders that looped around a potbelly like parentheses.” And insights: “But at eighteen, danger is a distant land.” Mood: “Behind and ahead the road lay dark, ghosted by the fog gliding along the pavement, smooth as the whisper of a knife.” Opening lines: “He loved all three of her noses.”
Many of these stories deal with the class system in small, American towns. They expose the way it is so pronounced and yet so invisible. In no story is that more true than “Roons,” which near the end of the book comes in at 70 pages, meeting the length criterion of a novella.
Some of these stories are incredibly clever. Often when people write clever stories, they seem to think cleverness is all a story requires. I’ve always felt Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Lottery,” comes dangerously close to that, though she somehow pulls it off. But when Mr. Daniel comes up with a clever story, he’s not satisfied to let the form of the story carry the weight. He puts in the same sort of work on other aspects of the story (e.g., dialogue, character development, specific details concerning setting and the passage of time, sensory details that invite the reader into the story, etc.), that he puts into stories for which the form plays a less important role. My favorite of those stories, and one of my favorites in the entire collection, is “Ship in a Bottle,” which takes place late on a rainy night in a restaurant by a harbor.
In fact, as the title implies, all of these stories take place by the sea. Some are narrated in the first person by an adult looking back on his childhood or youth. In others, the narrator is nearly invisible. But they all have something to offer.
March 15, 2024
Beach Town: Stories is, as the title implies, connected stories from a beach town and the people who grew up there in the 1960’s, just before the Vietnam War. Weybridge is a working class place of neighborhoods of small homes where kids do what kids did before organized sports and after school daycare -- they attempt to find something to do to amuse themselves whether it’s trying their first cigarette with a kid from the wrong part of town, or running through a sprinkler as a friend’s mother supervises from a lawn chair while she’s reading a magazine.
Daniel captures both the innocence of the times (his young narrators don’t know what an au pair is, for example; they are also longing for their first kiss or meeting friends at the annual carnival), and the dark secrets of some of the town’s residents. Moving effortlessly between the actual and the metaphorical (the grand opening of the town’s first automated car wash becomes a symbol of change), Daniel relies on lovely imagery and succinct prose to capture these residents’ nostalgia, not only for their hometown, but for their adolescence.
Where does time go, many of these narrators wonder, when, decades later, they read the obituaries of their neighbors or cast a look out the window as their plane takes off over the ragged coastline of Massachusetts. As one character says, “Time, if fate allows, lets us become poets of the doomed action, the unrequited love, the hard struggle.” Because the stories read like memoir, it’s easy to find oneself jarred by the perspective that time allows us—to think, as one narrator does, about the kids we went to high school with and with whom we felt some kind of bond, only to realize we haven’t seen them in forty years and never said a formal goodbye.
Beyond these moments of recognizable truths, there is humor here and much wisdom. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
Daniel captures both the innocence of the times (his young narrators don’t know what an au pair is, for example; they are also longing for their first kiss or meeting friends at the annual carnival), and the dark secrets of some of the town’s residents. Moving effortlessly between the actual and the metaphorical (the grand opening of the town’s first automated car wash becomes a symbol of change), Daniel relies on lovely imagery and succinct prose to capture these residents’ nostalgia, not only for their hometown, but for their adolescence.
Where does time go, many of these narrators wonder, when, decades later, they read the obituaries of their neighbors or cast a look out the window as their plane takes off over the ragged coastline of Massachusetts. As one character says, “Time, if fate allows, lets us become poets of the doomed action, the unrequited love, the hard struggle.” Because the stories read like memoir, it’s easy to find oneself jarred by the perspective that time allows us—to think, as one narrator does, about the kids we went to high school with and with whom we felt some kind of bond, only to realize we haven’t seen them in forty years and never said a formal goodbye.
Beyond these moments of recognizable truths, there is humor here and much wisdom. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
June 21, 2024
Whenever David Daniel writes something: I read it. Eagerly, happily, most rewardingly. I've said that before; I'm saying it now; and I'll continue saying it for a long time. The stories in "Beach Town" are so eminently readable! Most importantly -- North Weybridge, the setting for the stories in "Beach Town" (in reality the South Shore of Boston) -- continues to populate the numerous other stories and novels (see especially his novel "Re-Union") of this world within-the-world Daniel has created: a world to rival Wendell Berry's 'Port William Membership' and William Faulkner's 'Yoknapatawpha County,' his southern forebearers: at long last, a region to counter the South's. The stories here are all sublime and add much to his oeuvre, but the novella included in "Beach Town," 'Roons,' shows Daniel at his mystery writer best -- the genre that's earned him numerous awards and accolades. But whether a short story, novella, or mystery, whatever Daniel's written: read it. For there's no doubt about it here, "'Roons' is the cherry on the top of this sundae -- and the rest of the stories . . . are the jimmies!"
October 27, 2023
In Beach Town, author David Daniel gives us a feast of nostalgia, based in part of his upbringing in such a place. Though he fictionalizes some of the occurrences, there is truth in the manner of story, and a longing sense of things that are no more, but are missed. Tales of pre-war service, pre-adulthood, of working lousy jobs for lousy pay, trying to date and drive and grow up and become someone. Sure, there's the awkwardness and angst, but there is also sweetness and happy times. A few tales are genuinely spooky, adding spice to the mix. Definitely worth the read to see a world that no longer exists.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews