Love Begins in Winter

January 19, 2009
Van Booy's sentimental second collection deals heavily in the neuroses and personal traumas of his characters. The longish title story follows Brunno Bonnet, an emotionally debilitated cellist with a fondness for stones who encounters Hannah, a bird-obsessed shop owner with a fondness for acorns. In the beautiful “The Missing Statues,” Max, a young diplomat is reduced to tears at the edge of St. Peter's Square in Rome as memories of childhood in seedy Las Vegas overwhelm him. In the excellent “The Coming and Going of Strangers,” a multigenerational story of heroism, tragedy, love and family finds its roots with Walter, a Romany Irish gypsy who falls in love with a Canadian orphan girl. Though Van Booy's tendency to deliver a late-story surprise becomes predictable, each of these stories has moments of sheer loveliness.

March 15, 2009
Couples find surprising, if not downright strange ways to come together in a second romance-centered collection by Van Booy (The Secret Lives of People in Love, 2007).

The author has a pitch-perfect tone for writing about the tender passion. Instead of florid, melodramatic prose, the five tales feature hushed, patient storytelling that's deliberately abstracted; Van Booy's goal is to capture the ineffable nature of falling in love. The title story is a braided narrative involving Bruno, a famous concert cellist prone to musing on the death of his sister years ago, and Hannah, who similarly mourns the untimely loss of her young brother. Restrained without being icy, it recalls a Bergman film as it returns to such curious, ghostly characters as the nun Bruno sees writing on a frosted window, or the homeless man Hannah watches in a Los Angeles park. Van Booy has a taste for merging such gentle imagery with more violent moments, as when Hannah's father chops off his hand after the death of his son."The Coming and Going of Strangers" opens with a gypsy man risking his life to save a child from drowning. Two decades later, the man's son seems to have inherited his father's nobility, which helps readers understand that he's more than a Peeping Tom as he obsessively spies on the girl he adores. Van Booy's gauzy characterizations can be maddening: Is the narrator of"Tiger, Tiger" unhealthily fixated on a pediatrician who had an affair with her mother-in-law, or is he truly amazingly wise, as she seems to believe? In this particular universe, emotion counts for more than motivation, so the hero of"The City of Windy Trees" doesn't seem especially odd for being so absurdly concerned with Raisinets and David Bowie songs. His journey from New York to Sweden to meet his daughter comes to such a sweet, sensible resolution that it convincingly shows how love rights the world.

Appealing and surprising takes on a subject prone to clich.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2009
In the five impressionistic stories in Van Booys latestcollection, following The Secret Lives of People in Love (2007), the author continues to develop his highly original style and his overriding theme of isolationversus connection. His characters are oftenterribly lonely, so much so that whenthey do find love, it istreated as a miraculous occurrence. Haunted by the memories of dead loved ones andable to readily access theintense emotions of childhood, his charactersseem to be not quite of this world. And yet, they are able to expressin the most unguarded and heartfelt language their innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, and victories.In The City of Windy Trees, George Frack learns, seven years after the fact, that a one-night stand with a Swedish waitress has produced a child. He quits his job and flies to Sweden, eager to meethis child andtoturn what might have been a nightmarish situation into the single most important thing thateverhappened to him.More about what is felt than what happens, Van Booysstoriespay beautiful homage to human connection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)