In Pinelight: A Novel - Softcover

Thomas Rayfiel is the author of six novels, including Time Among the Dead (2010) and Colony Girl (1999), a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 
The mysteries of life in a small town are beautifully told through the monologue of an old man's musings.
Rayfiel has created a poetic world through William, his narrator, who answers questions put to him by a real or imagined, but unseen, questioner. There is no linear storyline; it jumps and stutters, runs into beautiful thoughts and touches on the ugliness of life. This novel is unusual in form but beautiful in delivery. An eloquent exploration of life seen through an aging man's eyes. --Kirkus (starred review)

...a brilliant portrayal of small-town life in late 20th-century....reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, or, even better, Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood. This delightful and entertaining look at provincial life tells a story with quiet power and is a definite recommendation for book-discussion groups.  Library Journal (starred review)

  This is a masterfully written book. After a while its strange rhythms and bizarre images get into your brain. For all its experimental trappings, the pleasures of In Pinelight are surprisingly old-fashioned. Rayfiel's richly imagined small towns become a self-contained universe for the reader. This novel's harrowing, heartbreaking penultimate scene is one of the most beautiful and devastating things I've read in recent years. In Pinelight is one of this year's hidden gems.
  - Bookforum

...truly a tour-de-force, masterly in the way it eases flights of lyricism from William's artless-seeming yet remarkably artful testimony....Everything and nothing is meaningful in a way that makes one man's life, and his account of it, the sole repository of significance. And to turn that idea into language is Rayfiel's extraordinary gift.
 
Ellen Akins
Minneapolis Star-Tribune