Part 2: Oregon, Wyoming, and Other Western States

Best in the West Part II: Favorite Books of The Year

By Jenny Shank, 12-11-07

In part two of the NewWest.Net/Books Best Books of 2007 list, I’ll discuss my favorite books set in Oregon, Wyoming, and other Western states, and mention some Western anthologies.

Oregon

My favorite Oregon novel this year is Molly Gloss‘s beautifully written The Hearts of Horses (Houghton Mifflin), the story of 19-year-old Martha Lessen, who gallops into the fictional Elwha County in Eastern Oregon in 1917 and begins “looking for horses that need breaking out.” She soon sets up a “circle ride” to train a number of horses dispersed throughout the county in a circuit, and the name of her journey serves as the perfect metaphor for the interdependent yet distant families that she encounters.  It’s a coming-of-age story, a love story, and a cowboy tale all rolled into one.

And now for something completely different: performance artist, actress, filmmaker, and writer Miranda July is a tall drink of water in my book, and her debut short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You is just as funny, odd, and wonderful as her 2005 movie “Me and You and Everyone You Know” was.  July lived for several years in Portland, where her career first took off, and though many of the tales are too fantastical to be grounded in a specific geographical setting, several, including my favorite, “Something That Needs Nothing,” are set in Oregon. 

As I wrote in the Boulder Daily Camera earlier this year, “July has an uncanny ability for taking her characters down some sleazy avenues and managing to preserve their wide-eyed innocence. Perhaps this is because in July’s world, acts that some might label depraved are rendered free of guilt.” Other people liked July’s collection too: she just won the €35,000 Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize for it, beating out short story goddess Alice Munro, among others.

Utah

What’s up with this?  I didn’t come across any books set in Utah this year.  If you have suggestions for the best Utah book you read in 2007, feel free to comment below or

Wyoming

A biography about a charismatic Wyoming woman is one of my favorite books of the year set in The Cowboy State.  John Clayton‘s Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart (University of Nebraska Press) introduces Lockhart, pioneering female journalist, world traveler, promoter of Buffalo Bill’s legend, one of the founders of the Cody Stampede rodeo, novelist, newspaper publisher and editor, and Wyoming rancher.  Clayton’s biography captures this woman who was often difficult to love but always larger-than-life, and The Cowboy Girl is a striking portrait of a Western woman who lived on her own terms throughout her long, extraordinary life.

Wyoming-raised Michael Punke, who now lives in Missoula, roams all over the country in his compelling book Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and The Birth of the New West (Smithsonian Books), but I’ll file it under Wyoming, as many of its key scenes take place in Yellowstone.  The book offers a concise history of the 19th century decline of America’s bison population and details how the determination and passion of a few individuals, most notably the journalist and scientist George Bird Grinnell, preserved the last of the wild buffalo and allowed them to proliferate once again.

Other Western States

There are a few 2007 books with Western settings that take place outside of the Mountain West that I’ve got to mention among my favorites:

In The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster), Marianne Wiggins wrestles with the legacy of one of the American West’s greatest myth-makers, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, whose sepia-toned portraits of Native Americans in traditional dress still turn up in rest stop postcard kiosks and continue to shape the way that many people envision Indians as they used to be.  She accomplishes her tale through a daring blend of autobiography, historical fiction, art criticism, road trip narrative, and social commentary about modern day life in the West.  (The book is set in Washington, California, and Nevada, among other places.)

A California book that caught my attention this year was Alex Espinoza‘s debut novel Still Water Saints.  As I wrote in the Boulder Daily Camera, “Alex Espinoza conjures up an entire town of people, the residents of the fictional Agua Mansa, and brings each of them to vivid life. Although the town is located in Southern California, its tales of hardscrabble existence in a predominantly Mexican-American community could originate in any gritty urban fringe of the Southwest…The book cycles around Perla, the elderly proprietor of the Botánica Oshún, a store selling all manner of aids for psychic and spiritual ailments, such as ‘Quit Gossiping’ candles, ‘Adam and Eve’ love oil and ‘Repel Evil’ bath salts.”

I enjoyed two books with an Alaskan setting this year—Michael Chabon’s Yiddish-imbrued noir murder-mystery The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (Harper Collins), and Fairbanks native Jennifer Brice’s memoir Unlearning to Fly (University of Nebraska Press).

As I wrote in the Rocky Mountain News about Chabon’s book, “In 1938, President Roosevelt supported a U.S. Interior Department plan to admit Jewish refugees to Alaska to populate the territory’s land. Congress defeated this idea, but in his new novel, Michael Chabon imagines that it passed, allowing Jewish immigrants to temporarily settle in Sitka, Alaska (a town on an island southwest of Juneau).” I loved the way Chabon “imagined his world completely, down to the Polar-Shtern Kafeteria where Landsman takes his bachelor blintzes. The inhabitants of Sitka speak Yiddish primarily, lapsing into ‘American’ when they curse, use the metric system and have their own pop culture, with Shnapish the Dog standing in for Mickey Mouse.”

In her memoir Unlearning to Fly, Jennifer Brice tells tales from her adventures as a pilot, kayaker, and truck driver, as well as a stint as an obituary writer for a small newspaper. There is a refreshing humility implicit in the way Brice has constructed her memoir; it’s a structure that acknowledges the overall sweep of her life is not unusual (an education, various jobs, a marriage, three children, a divorce), but that its particulars are distinctive enough to be of interest to others.  And the particulars of Brice’s life are riveting.

Anthologies

Finally, I want to mention a few notable anthologies with Western themes that came out this year.  For a good dose of Western short fiction, check out Best Stories of the American West, Vol. 1 (Forge). The volume takes a catholic approach and pieces by “genre” Western writers sit comfortably alongside those by “literary” writers, and mixes stories by well-known and lesser-known writers.

Home Land: Ranching And a West that Works (Johnson Books) seeks common ground between Western environmentalists and ranchers, while A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places (Johnson Books) examines the impact of proliferating roads on wildlife.

In How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life (National Geographic Books), editor Tom Miller collects the first-person accounts of people who made the transition from the Spanish-speaking world to the English-speaking world, in a variety of essays that are often funny, poignant, and thought-provoking.

Finally, Listening to Cougar (University Press of Colorado) takes a look at the mountain lion, one of the West’s most charismatic carnivores, through the lenses of biology, ecology, spirituality, and myth.

Whew.  That’s a lot of books.  Don’t say you don’t have anything to read!  And remember to add your favorites in the comments.

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