SOURCE: Snodgrass, Kathleen. “Book Reviews.” Georgia Review 55, no. 1 (spring 2001): 149-61.

In the following excerpt, Snodgrass commends Banks's powerful and “supple” prose in The Angel on the Roof, asserting that Banks crafts “memorable stories out of ordinary lives without straining for effect or significance.”

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...