Kevin Canty’s New Novel “Everything” Garners Strong Reviews

By Jenny Shank, 8-19-10

The new novel Everything, by Missoula’s Kevin Canty, who teaches in the University of Montana writing program, has been getting some great reviews.  Alan Cheuse praised it on NPR as an “understated and affecting novel about contemporary Montana life.” Vendela Vida, writing for the New York Times, admired the whole book, but particularly noted its strong ending:

“Unlike the endings to much of Canty’s previous work, the last pages are filled with hope. Yet Canty isn’t ignorant of the lives the characters still have to live, of the mistakes they still have to make. When I arrived at the end of ‘Everything,’ I, too, thought: That’s it. That’s it exactly.”

And The New Yorker enjoyed it too:

“Canty’s fourth novel chronicles a year’s worth of turmoil in the lives of five appealingly aimless Montanans…Canty’s urgent, at times impressionistic prose generates moment after moment of intense emotion, falling flat only occasionally, and his characters are self-aware enough to keep the story from sinking into melodrama. As their conflicts play out against the changing seasons of the increasingly encroached-upon Bitterroot Valley wilderness—with its larches, bluebirds, and streams full of rainbow trout—we come to share their bafflement at the passage of time.”

Okay, I’m sold.  I need to read Everything.  Hopefully I’ll review it here soon.  Kevin Canty will be at the Montana Festival of the Book from October 28 through 30.

• Speaking of new novels by Montanans, Rick Bass has one coming out September 14, and it’s next up in my book stack.  It looks like a departure from Bass’s recent work, set in the South in 1959, about a family country music group.  Bass will discuss the book at Shakespeare & Co. in Missoula on Monday, August 23 (7 p.m.).

• Check out Linda Coatney’s thoughtful reflections on a recent wilderness and writing retreat with Gretel Ehrlich on the Wyoming Arts Blog.  Ehrlich led a group of writers into Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains.  Coatney describes the first writing session of the trip:

“Gretel Ehrlich sits on the forest floor high in Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. Her bare feet socialize with a six-inch evergreen sapling, as if playing with a kitten. She’s become very attached to this little tree as she’s sat there, she tells us, her students. She urges us to study the world around us, starting with this forest floor.

‘If you study a tiny ecosystem, you will understand how the whole world works,’ she says. Observe and write. ‘Writing is the most democratic of all the arts; you don’t need to depend on anyone or anything else; just need a pencil, a piece of paper and some ideas.’”

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