Eudora Welty has described “place” as “one of the lesser angels that watch over the hand of fiction, the one that gazes benignly enough from off to one side, while others, like character, plot, symbolic meaning, and so on are doing a good deal of wing-beating about her chair.” That lesser angel, says Welty, looms larger in realistic fiction: “Besides furnishing a plausible abode for the novel's world of feeling, place has a good deal to do with making the characters real, that is, themselves, and keeping them so. … Place, then, has the most delicate control over character too: by confining character, it defines it.” These characters must necessarily be inhabitants of a “chink-proof world of appearance,” a world that these five books under review all share. …

Russell Banks's collection of thirty-one stories, The Angel on the Roof, has been culled from four previously published books of stories and arranged, he tells us in an author's note, “thematically and dramatically” rather than chronologically. In prose that's muscular and supple, knowing and compassionate, Banks creates wonderfully memorable characters, especially when he is writing about the working-class families—most notably his own—of his native New England. These stories, which make up more than half the book, are often set in the small town of Catamount, New Hampshire, its rural environs, or in the trailer park outside of town. The sense of place—or, more to the point, the seemingly inescapable pressure of place on psyches and relationships—is an essential thematic element.

What most distinguishes Banks's New England is the wintry clime, winter being the season of choice in these stories though the mood is not necessarily chilly or bleak. Merle Ring, the protagonist of “The Fisherman,” one of the collection's longest and most entertaining stories, lives for winter and spends his days and nights ice fishing on the frozen lake in his carefully constructed bob-house, a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey at the ready. The story begins with a connoisseur's keen-eyed appreciation of winter's onset, culminating in the view from within the pitch-black bob-house at the world below: “The light filtered through the ice is still, hard, and cold, like an algebraic equation, and you can watch the world pass through it with a clarity, objectivity, and love that is usually thought to be the prerogative of gods.”

The human equation most engages Banks, and he scrutinizes it with a bemused fondness that never lapses into sentimentality. In “The Fisherman,” Banks introduces a cast of characters, working-class denizens of the trailer park, who will appear in subsequent stories. When Merle wins two lotteries—giving away the first in never-to-be-repaid loans to his neighbors, casually tossing the second windfall in a cigar box—his neighbors' thoughts turn obsessive and proprietary: “The money gave him power, and the longer he neither acted nor reacted to the presence of that money, the greater grew his power.” In a wonderfully comic and chaotic scene, the story comes to an appropriately allegorical close.

The story is unique in the collection for its sly, Olympian detachment, a reflection of the protagonist's bead on the world. In the main, Banks tends to take a harder, closer look at his characters, many of them stymied by bad luck and worse husbands, by self-serving choices and rationalizations, and, like those in Manley's work, by fantasies of escape or rescue. Banks's stories based on his own family—a hard-drinking, womanizing father who abandons his embittered, long-suffering wife and their three children—are among his strongest. By the book's end, we've seen this family from different perspectives and in different time periods; we've heard the stories they each tell themselves, stories that even as they seem to let their tellers off the hook really affix them more firmly to it.

Nelson Painter, the protagonist of “Firewood,” is the now-aged father married to his second wife but most deeply attached to vodka. In a quietly horrific scene, Banks describes Nelson's first (6 a.m.) drink of the day:

a deliberate, slow act as measured and radiant as a sacrament, as sweet to him as the sun rising over the winter-burnt New Hampshire hills, as clean as new frost. … He sips at the vodka steadily, as if nibbling at it, and his gratitude for it is nearly boundless, and though he appears to be studying the darkness out the window, he's seeing only as far as the glass in his hand and is thinking only about the vodka as it fits like a tiny, pellucid pouch in his mouth, breaks into a thin stream, and rolls down his throat, warming his chest as it passes and descends into his stomach, where the alcohol enters his blood and then his heart and brain, enlarging him and bringing him to heated life, filling the stony, cold man with light and feeling and sentiment, blessing him with an exact nostalgia for the very seconds of his life as they pass, which in this man is as close to love as he has been able to come for years, maybe since childhood.

In “The Guinea Pig Lady,” Marcelle recognizes the deep fatigue in another woman's face as her own, though by now her children are grown:

Because she had raised them herself, while at the same time fending off the attacks of the man who had fathered them on her, she thought of her life as work and her work as feeding, housing, and clothing her three surviving children and teaching them to be kindly, strong people, despite the fact that their father happened to have been a cruel, weak person. A life like that, or rather, twenty-five years of it, can permanently mark your face and make it instantly recognizable to anyone who happens to be engaged in similar work.

And in “Queen for a Day,” one of the most wrenching stories, eldest son Earl writes long, urgent letters to Jack Bailey—host of the 1950's TV show—after his father has abandoned the family. At age twelve, Earl is weighed down with responsibilities and fears: “Often, late at night, lying in his squeaky, narrow cot next to his brother's, Earl would say to himself, ‘I'm the man of the house now,’ and somehow just saying it, over and over … like a prayer, made his terror ease back from his face, and he could finally slip into sleep.”

Several of Banks's nonautobiographical stories lack the urgency and power so characteristic of his familial tales: “Djinn,” for example, is a carefully constructed fable that finally seems both pat and insubstantial, in part because it is an allegory with a highly realistic setting. Similarly, in the stories based on historical figures—Poe in “The Caul” and Simón Bolívar in “The Rise of the Middle Class”—there tends to be a deadly writer's-exercise air. In one of these, however, Banks takes as his protagonist a marginal historical figure, Jane Hogarth (the wife of the eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth), and creates a memorable character, a memorable story.

By all reports, the marriage was a happy one; after Hogarth's death his widow maintained his high standard of engraving work. But in Banks's story, “Indisposed,” the tall, ungainly Jane is trapped in a loveless match with a small (Hogarth wasn't quite five feet tall) and choleric tyrant. On this particular day, Jane drops out of her life for twenty-four hours: lying in bed, she is like “the trunk of a fallen tree moldering and sinking slowly into the damp, soft ground of the forest,” “a wagon without wheels.” The second-person narration gives the sense of both intense privacy (Jane addressing her literal self) and equally intense intimacy with the reader. Jane lies motionless in bed

like a great and dignified beast trapped in quicksand, resigned, yet with all its systems functioning efficiently in the darkness. … You pity it for its very presence in the world, its large and pathetic demands on space, the way it tries and constantly fails to avoid being seen. And the way it has at last given up that attempt, has at last agreed to be seen, to be wholly present. You pity it, and finally you understand it. You understand the body of Jane Hogarth.

One can hardly resist quoting at length from Banks's stories, with their abundance of startling, epiphanic images. The middle-aged protagonist in “Quality Time” has always considered himself a caring, selfless father to his only child. But hearing his now-grown daughter speak of their relationship, he “sees that he's been a man completely opposed to the man he thought he was.” The young protagonist of “Success Story” sets out to excel as a lowly furniture mover in a hotel, “Which was like deciding to succeed at being a prisoner of war, deciding to become a good prisoner of war.”

Banks is just as masterful in quiet, prosaic moments, as in the close of “The Moor.” Fifty-year-old Warren has just had a brief reunion with an eighty-year-old woman whom he hasn't seen since their brief affair, thirty years ago: “Time's come, time's gone, time's never returning, I say to myself. What's here in front of me is all I've got, I decide, and as I drive myself through the blowing snow it doesn't seem like much, except for the kindness that I've just exchanged with an old lady, so I concentrate on that.”

In “Place in Fiction” Welty describes the writer as “seeing double, two pictures at once in his frame, his and the world's. … It is his clear intention—his passion, I would say—to make the reader see only one of the pictures—the author's—under the pleasing illusion that it is the world's.” Banks is a master of such illusions, crafting memorable stories out of ordinary lives without straining for effect or significance.