If there's a defining season in Russell Banks' extraordinary body of work, it would be a discontented winter, a deep New England freeze that forces his working-class laborers to retreat into broken homes, damaged relationships, and the faint comfort of a liquor bottle. In immensely powerful novels such as Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, and Cloudsplitter, winter also becomes a time of reflection and reconciliation, when characters are so affected by their personal histories that the past has left a painful, irrevocable mark on the present. The most resonant tales in The Angel On The Roof—a complete volume of 31 short stories, 22 from earlier collections—find Banks circling back to the same forbidding climate that has haunted him throughout his career. An expansive storyteller by nature, Banks' style isn't always well-suited to the short form, but even in a brief glimpse, he has the power to authentically locate the feelings of regret and alienation that can grip the average American family. Abuse, alcoholism, multiple divorces, and strained parent-child relationships are recurring problems, inevitably passed on from one generation to the next. Sometimes, the healthiest response is to salvage simple, poignant moments out of time, such as a father watching his estranged grown-up daughter crest a hill on her old three-speed bike ("Quality Time") or a never-was hockey player reviving fond memories by taking to the ice again under just the right conditions ("Defenseman"). Others aren't so lucky, forced to live with the bitter disappointment of a distant son ("Firewood") or the slow, impending tragedy of an infant daughter in the grips of spinal meningitis ("The Child Screams And Looks Back At You"). The New England stories in The Angel On The Roof reveal Banks' mastery at inhabiting vivid settings with people whose lives haven't quite met their expectations. But once he leaves home, his touch is noticeably less certain. "The Caul" and "Indisposed" attempt to imagine the lives of real figures—the former a second-person account of Edgar Allan Poe doing a reading in Virginia, the latter about portrait painter William Hogarth's wife—but they're disappointingly precious and trite. The tale of a shoe executive transplanted in a recently industrialized West African town ("Djinn") opens with promise, then abandons its strong ideas on racism and cultural exploitation for a didactic conclusion. But most of the stories, especially the longer pieces toward the end of the collection, confirm Banks' gift for exploring how people cope with the life they've inherited. And since no one can escape his or her inheritance, Banks' personal themes transform into a bracing, real, and universal take on the human condition.