BASEBALL

BOX SOCIALS by W. P. Kinsella (Ballantine Books: $20; 222 pp.). “Box Socials” is ostensibly an account of how Truckbox Al McClintock, a teen-age sultan of swat, ended up facing Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller. The confrontation came in an exhibition game in Edmonton, Alberta, far from Truckbox’s hometown of Fark, a Canadian hamlet whose frigid climate features nine months of winter followed by three months of poor sledding.

This time out, Kinsella, best known for his novel “Shoeless Joe” (made into the film “Field of Dreams”), has more than baseball on his mind. “Box Socials” is a whimsical portrait of 1940s-era small-town life, crowded with everything from owl-calling contests to raucous, five-day Ukrainian weddings. It’s a delightful comic ramble, written in a quirky, digressive style that reads like a cross between Gertrude Stein and Al Capp.

Full of combative, old-country immigrants, Fark is a richly textured creation, a boisterous first cousin to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. It’s a one-gas-pump town populated with bulldog-faced bankers’ daughters and ornery farmers who guzzle corn liquor, otherwise known as “bring-on-blindness, logging-boot-to-the-side-of-the-head homebrew.”

Kinsella has a knack for creating vivid characters, ranging from barefoot temptress Louisa May Sigurdson to Earl J. Rasmussen, a bachelor who lives alone in the hills with 600 sheep and loves to recite “Casey at the Bat” at the top of his lungs. The book’s not long on plot; young Jamie O’Day, a boy with a dog named Benito Mussolini, narrates in the leisurely manner of a hot-stove storyteller who has all winter to sort out complicated romantic entanglement and family feuds.

But once you get in tune with Kinsella’s peculiar cadence, you’re ready to spend all winter in Fark, hypnotized by the tall folk tales that cast a spell as strong as Fark’s best homebrew.