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ben_miller's review against another edition
3.0
A mixed bag, which makes sense since it was just something cobbled together in the wake of All the King's Men's success, and these stories were never written with a coherent collection in mind. I like the novellas at either end of the book best, which suggests to me that Warren gets better as his canvas grows larger. Some of the smaller stories, little more than vignettes, didn't work for me. They seemed like writerly experiments more than fully-realized pieces. I did like these, though: "Goodwood Comes Back," "The Patented Gate," "A Christian Education," and "Testament of Flood."
djrmelvin's review against another edition
4.0
An alternate title for this book could be "The Funeral in the Basement" or something along those lines, because at the heart of every one of these stories is death and saying goodbye. In my mind, that makes for good reading, especially when the stories are told by an author as unsympathetic to his characters as Robert Penn Warren is. By far, my favorite new-to-me story of this book was "The Patented Gate and The Mean Hamburger", probably the closest Warren ever got to writing humor, but of course, it's dark humor. "A Christian Education" I've read before in several short story anthologies, and it is a story that holds up to being read over and over again. Many of these stories focus on tobacco farmers, set in a time when tobacco growing was an honorable and honest way to make a living. It's become politically incorrect to remember that time, making this collection of stories historically important as well as great reading. My only negative goes along with the almost always true bit of writer's advice: never write in dialect. As great as a writer as Warren is, his attempt to use dialog to create setting is jarring, and when that happens in the first story of a collection, it jumps out in every other story that follows.
xterminal's review
4.0
Robert Penn Warren, The Circus in the Attic (Dell, 1947)
The back jacket of the book says, "These stories come from the pen of one of America's half-dozen great writers." Given the time period of the book's release, that was really saying something. Something accurate, but something nonetheless. Penn Warren (who won the Pulitzer two year's before for All the King's Men) wrote the stories in this book over the course of fifteen years. Most were previously published.
The book is framed with two novellas, the title story and "Prime Leaf," with a number of shorter works in between. As with most of Penn Warren's work, the tales are about depression-era and WW2-era life in the American south, people going on about their day-to-day business. A number of the stories deal with the same town, and the same characters pass in and out of them, so the reader gets the feeling of getting to know different aspects of the town as he goes from story to story.
Part of the magic of Penn Warren's work is the ability to simultaneously expose to the reader the quiet dignity of the proletariat and the basic stupidity of human nature. Not an easy thing to make the reader respect the people he's laughing at. But that's exactly what happens time and again in this book. The characters do dumb things for various reasons, but we always understand what those reasons are, and most of the time we can see how the character gets from the reason to the justification to the act without a problem. And while there's always a moral to be had, Robert Penn Warren is certainly not Aesop. The moral is there, waiting to be found, but the reader who's not interested in the morality of the tales is allowed to go off on his merry way and not contemplate the deeper meaning of what's here. That, too, is part of Robert Penn Warren's gift. *** 1/2
The back jacket of the book says, "These stories come from the pen of one of America's half-dozen great writers." Given the time period of the book's release, that was really saying something. Something accurate, but something nonetheless. Penn Warren (who won the Pulitzer two year's before for All the King's Men) wrote the stories in this book over the course of fifteen years. Most were previously published.
The book is framed with two novellas, the title story and "Prime Leaf," with a number of shorter works in between. As with most of Penn Warren's work, the tales are about depression-era and WW2-era life in the American south, people going on about their day-to-day business. A number of the stories deal with the same town, and the same characters pass in and out of them, so the reader gets the feeling of getting to know different aspects of the town as he goes from story to story.
Part of the magic of Penn Warren's work is the ability to simultaneously expose to the reader the quiet dignity of the proletariat and the basic stupidity of human nature. Not an easy thing to make the reader respect the people he's laughing at. But that's exactly what happens time and again in this book. The characters do dumb things for various reasons, but we always understand what those reasons are, and most of the time we can see how the character gets from the reason to the justification to the act without a problem. And while there's always a moral to be had, Robert Penn Warren is certainly not Aesop. The moral is there, waiting to be found, but the reader who's not interested in the morality of the tales is allowed to go off on his merry way and not contemplate the deeper meaning of what's here. That, too, is part of Robert Penn Warren's gift. *** 1/2
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