Faith: Stories

A poet turns to prose for his first story collection, but for all its evocativeness and precision of language, the writing here is too self-conscious and metaphorically strained. Smith (The Cardinal Heart) sandwiches and links the 14 stories with 15 vignettes featuring the internal musings of a young boy named Corey who spends a great deal of time with his grandparents, whose south Georgia mill-town house sits across the street from a drive-in theater. The millworker and farmhand characters of the stories expose the arid human stratums of the low-Protestant Bible Belt. Included are glimpses of a man estranged from his wife because of her astrological preoccupation with a comet; a bevy of female cotton-mill workers who sublimate their loneliness by playing arcade games; the singular resolve of a fanatically religious aunt to save the soul of the pubescent son of her dead sister; and a man who is about to lose his father's land because he is being sued by a mousy young schoolteacher. While the collection sometimes sparkles with sharp insights into the souls of these characters, their futures loom so bleak it sometimes seems difficult, or too risky, to care about them. (Dec.)