The Incubator Ballroom; A Novella and Four Stories

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. First First Edition [stated], presumed first printing Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads To Helen with admiration and affection John May 17, 1991. John Rolfe Gardiner (born 1936) is an American author of several novels and short stories. He is best known for his novel Somewhere in France, aside from which he has written four other novels and two short-story collections. Sixteen of his stories were published in The New Yorker; others were published in other publications. His short story "The Voyage Out" was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. His work was awarded the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award and the O. Henry Award. In this title novella and in the stories that follow, the land itself--the northern Virginia territory that John Rolfe Gardiner has made his fictional preserve--becomes a central force. The short stories are titled: Karaghala's Daughter, Our Janice, World After Dark, and In Dairyland. Peopled by outsiders who are beset by today's search for place, the land gives refuge--but at a price. Come-latelies suffer the critical gaze of native neighbors, the disapproval of forsaken relatives. A mafioso from New Jersey and his daughter try to hide their past in the lush hills. A West Virginia plumber finds a way to rescue his au pair girlfriend from her loving employers...a teenage boy has his reasons for trespassing on off-limits property...a young wife from D.C. worries that a cross may have been burned in her field. The settlers are never quite settled. Throughout, John Rolfe Gardiner delights us with his enriching vision of people and place, a vision that travels easily across the wider American Landscape. Derived from a Kirkus review: Gardiner here tenders a novella and four tighter short stories. In the centerpiece novella--a tale called ""Incubator Ballroom""--Gardiner portrays a rural Virginia family teetering on the edge of encroaching real-estate "development." Eddie, an unofficial classics scholar, has withdrawn from the professional classes to farm in his black pajamas, cultivating a bemused detachment toward wife and family. His daughter Grace, emerging as the animating principal of the farm, combines unaffected sexuality with a desire to see the family's land put to good use. Dispersing the focus here are the random sisters, and hired farmhands. When Eddie is ultimately forced to sell, the farm is quickly converted into 67 manicured lots, leaving Grace to preside over a heartland remnant, and creating instant wealth for family members who find themselves transported into a new millionaire caste. There is strength in individual episodes. Gardiner is on more comfortable ground in the remaining four pieces, where misfits are placed in relief against the Virginia countryside: a young working-class woman hired on by a family as an "au pair girl"; a retired thug juxtaposed with the equestrian country crowd; Canada geese straying into a dairy farm; a counterculture family alienated from the local farming community. All in all: four hits--and Gardiner is still at his best working within the short-fiction form.