Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance

Extremely Contemporary Fiction

"Middle age and misfortune" unite Benny Gregg, an overweight geologist on a packaged trip through Chinese Central Asia, and his two traveling companions, but these are also the qualities that make him a likely candidate for a comeuppance in Matthew Kneale's collection, Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance. The characters in these wry, perfectly crafted stories are mostly middle-class and well taken care of, but they are plagued by hubris and unfulfilled desire. Benny, who is the main character in the story "Weight," takes home a local beauty as his bride (having ditched the other sad sacks), but his paranoid fear that she will leave him poisons the marriage. In "Powder," a milquetoast, midlevel solicitor finally fulfills his ambitions of wealth and social respect when he becomes an accidental coke dealer, only to blow it all -- so to speak -- on a petty confrontation. In "Taste," the wealthy Caroline takes the disappearance of some sweets from the kitchen a little too seriously, and then makes herself humiliatingly vulnerable in front of the help. Kneale strikes a light, tragicomic tone throughout, revealing his characters and all their pathetic wants so that we can laugh at them, and then asking us to root for them all the same.

With all its class anxiety, Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance feels very British (even poor Benny, the one American in the bunch, sounds like a Brit). But this is a global age, after all, and Kneale has that in mind. Not only does he set his stories in Italy, Africa and China, but he ventures into the points of view of non-Westerners, too. "Leaves," for instance, follows a Colombian family whose field has been destroyed by anti-cocaine spraying; "White" watches as a young Palestinian man sets out on a suicide mission for which he lacks the necessary conviction. The moralizing is gentle, but it is there all the same, reminding us with humor which of our concerns are important, and which are absurd.

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