In The Snow Forest
by Roy Parvin
(Norton)
Annie Bloom’s Books, 246-0053
Thurs Oct 19
The first page of Roy Parvin’s new book, In the Snow Forest, reads with all the beauty and dark strength of Denis Johnson: “He was a big man who looked like trouble, even with his glasses. A cruel fact of nature that made Gibbs a prisoner of his own body long before he became an actual one, at Pine River or the various and lesser security county facilities before that. He’d been back in the world for months now and had few things to show for it, chiefly a girlfriend and a parole officer, neither of whom was able to give Gibbs what he really needed or wanted…”
As the work develops it moves into an introspective, gentle mode, often reminding me of the careful writing of Kevin Canty. The settings are bleak and desolate, the characters aging and fumbling. There’s a slow pace to the language–Parvin takes the time to fill in details, as though to match the act of lumbering through snow drifts and deep woods.
Although the material–broken hearts and general loneliness–is timeless, Parvin has chosen to set two of the three stories back a few decades. The first takes place in 1975, the last in ’57. This gives the last story a particular charm. When the main character, a divorced woman, seduces a man she meets on the train, the limited and quick sex scene is quietly surrounded by a sense of daring and the morals of the ’50’s.
The book is marketed as a collection of three novellas, though the entire book is barely 200 pages long. Each work is compressed and focused, reading more as extended short stories than with the complexity in plot or the tangents of abbreviated novels.