Deirdre McNamer’s “Red Rover”

By Jenny Shank, 8-06-07

Red Rover
By Deirdre McNamer
Viking, 264 pages, $24.95

World War II sent thousands of small town Americans to far-flung parts of the globe.  Many of the men who served returned home and lived much as they would have had the war not interrupted.  But they did so burdened with wartime memories that many of them kept to themselves.  In her new novel, Red Rover, Missoula novelist and U of M professor Deirdre McNamer examines the emotional fallout caused by the events of World War II among a group of Montanans, spanning from 1927 to 2003. 

McNamer (who will discuss Red Rover at Fact and Fiction in Missoula on August 7) does this with admirable concision, skipping ahead sixty years from one chapter to the next, taking care to build her scenes with such a specificity of detail that the reader is right there with her characters, whether they are boys playing gauchos on the Montana prairie, a man piloting a B-29 bomber in a run over Japan, or octogenarians braving the deteriorations of their bodies in and out of rehabilitation facilities in Missoula.

The scenes that occur earliest in the chronology “Red Rover” cycle around the 1927 visit of Charles Lindbergh to Montana, a technique that orients readers as it lets them into the perspectives of all of the principal characters.  Brothers Aidan and Neil Tierney are off on a horseback ramble, pretending they are “gauchos of the Argentine,” when Neil, the younger, has an accident.  They make it back to town for help in time to see Lindbergh’s plane fly by.  Aidan is a confident, affectionate, and easygoing brother in this scene. 

When McNamer next introduces Aidan, he has returned to Montana after his requested hazardous duty FBI assignment in South America.  He’s ill and diminished, and in 1946 he is found dead of a shotgun wound in the chest.  The coroner, an oddball named Opal Mix, rules it a “probable accident,” while intimating to the family that it may have been suicide, an explanation that does little to satisfy Neil, who has returned from his stint as a B-29 pilot.  Neil’s talk with Roland Taliaferro, one of Aidan’s college friends who also joined the FBI and stayed in after the war, only makes Neil more suspicious that Aidan’s secret wartime mission had something to do with his death.

McNamer teases out the mystery, cutting back and forth in time, introducing other characters whose actions illuminate the relationship between Aidan and Roland.  The principal drama in the 2003 sections of the book begins when Neil Tierney, his vision obscured by cataracts, is driving down the street in the small Montana town of Neva.  “Neva had become so elderly and gray that youth and noise jumped from its surface like colored fish,” McNamer writes.  A group of skateboarders is dare-deviling nearby, and one of them, a girl with “flamingo pink” hair named Deedee Valentine, darts in front of Neil’s car.  This incident sets up an eventual meeting between the survivors of the Aidan drama, but it would be doing readers a disservice to reveal any more of the plot.

The gripping intrigue of McNamer’s plot is matched by the flinty beauty of her prose.  Her observations have the ring of truth ("trouble isn’t trouble until it won’t leave"), and she can conjure up a character in the space of a few sentences.  None of her characters seem minor because she renders them so vividly. 

This is particularly true of Opal Mix, a fussbudget nurse who bluntly proposes to a recovering patient in 1927 ("Porter Mix,” Opal said.  “I think we should marry, and move.").  Her husband becomes an undertaker and coroner and she helps him with his duties.  Porter addresses Opal as “Mother,” they live “as brother and sister,” and join every club that Missoula of 1939 has to offer: “The Chamber, the Knights, the Shriners, the Legion, the Lions, the Scouts, Professional Women’s, Matrix, Nile, the Tuberculosis Association, the Hoo Hoo Club…”

And there’s Wendell Whitcomb, a hyper boy who is obsessed with the FBI and suspects his undertaker neighbors of spying for the enemy.  “Mix had what an experienced G-man might call The Tinge,” McNamer writes in Wendell’s perspective.  “This was a quality--the best spy hunters felt it in their bones--that signaled the existence in a suspect of a clandestine life.” Wendell dogs Opal to the reader’s delight.

Red Rover is an accomplished, satisfying novel that turns on the often undetected connections that can run between people.  Anyone who has seen how war can change a life will appreciate McNamer’s careful, unsentimental examination of a group of World War II veterans and their family members.  McNamer has removed the “greatest generation” gloss from her characters and in doing so, has made them into real people. 

In an early scene set after the war, some friends are laughing over the time 17-year-old Aidan “calmly punched out a two-hundred-pound truck driver.” After the story is told, McNamer writes, “They’re laughing now, the way they did the first time, but harder.  Because the years have been fierce and they need the story more.” As war continues, once again sending small town Americans across the world, it’s safe to say that Red Rover is the story needed now.

Deirdre McNamer will be on a book tour throughout the region this month, beginning with an appearance at Fact and Fiction in Missoula on August 7, then she’ll be on to Hamilton, MT (Chapter One Books, August 9), Portland, OR (Powell’s, August 13), Seattle (Elliott Bay, August 14), Spokane (Auntie’s Bookstore, August 15), Salt Lake City (King’s English, August 20), and Denver (Tattered Cover, August 21).  She’ll appear at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula on September 14-15.