The title of Gerard Woodward’s new book of short stories offers a simile for the experience of reading the book too good to pass up. Immersion in these stories is comparable to entering an amusement park to which people carry the ordinary and everyday aspects of their lives, but which is also a hyperreal space marked by the marvellous and a carnival atmosphere. Repeatedly, Woodward’s stories astonish: they seem to offer a predictable direction, then swerve elsewhere. And just like the toy that lends the title story’s playground its name, these narratives are meticulously designed, building into dazzling and surprising structures.
Woodward, author of the highly regarded trilogy that traces the Jones family through several decades (August; I’ll Go to Bed at Noon; A Curious Earth), is known for his acute observations of domestic life, and that ability is on display from the opening page of Legoland: but this volume, like his 2008 collection Caravan Thieves, revels in the possibilities of the short story, straying into the surreal and the absurd with glee. The stories range in genre from realism to pseudo-fairytale and in geography from postwar Germany to Colorado.
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