Best in the West Part 1: Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and New Mexico

Favorite Books of 2007

By Jenny Shank, 12-10-07

I enjoy traveling to far-flung places in my reading, but I’m always happy to discover a good book that’s set closer to home.  So for the NewWest.Net/Books Best Books of 2007 list, I’m going to break down my favorites by the states in which they take place.  Of course, this is a highly subjective list culled from the books that I happened to read this year, and I’m sure I’ve missed some good ones.  Please chime in with your favorites.  Today I’ll discuss Colorado, Idaho, and Montana, and New Mexico and tomorrow it’s on to Oregon, Wyoming, and other Western states.

Colorado

There weren’t many novels set in my home state of Colorado that I came across this year, but at least there was one very accomplished one: Grand Junction-raised Aryn Kyle’s debut novel, The God of Animals (Scribner).  The book tells the story of a teenager named Alice living on a ranch with her horse trainer father, who is having trouble making ends meet.  Kyle, who now lives in Missoula, is deft at portraying the way adolescents make sense of the world by adding up the information gleaned from stolen glimpses and voices heard through walls.

Kyle, who now lives in Missoula, makes keen use of people’s psychological ploys and status-conscious decisions, a theme that carries over into her story “Allegiance,” which was featured in The Best American Short Stories 2007.

In the nonfiction category for Colorado, I have to go with a dinosaur book.  I’ve been a sucker for dinosaurs since the day my brother and I found a huge rock in the school yard, decided it was a fossilized dinosaur skull, and spent all afternoon digging it up and hauling it home in a wagon, visions of the millions we’d make from selling it to a museum filling our heads.  Kirk Johnson is the vice president and chief curator of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and he’s never lost his childlike enthusiasm for fossils, as evidenced by the exuberant Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway (Fulcrum Publishing), with rich, comic illustrations by Roy Troll. The book documents the fossil finds and fossil-lovers the men encountered during nine years of traveling the American West. When the condition of fossil worship persists into adulthood, Johnson writes, it’s called PNS, or “Paleo Nerd Syndrome.” So that’s what’s wrong with me.

Idaho

My pick for the best novel set in Idaho this year is Ron Carlson‘s Five Skies (Viking). It’s a beautiful, haunting book that takes place largely under the wide-open Idaho sky, about three men who spend the summer constructing a ramp near a canyon for use by a female daredevil. The book is quiet and takes its time, as Carlson lovingly describes the precise details of the men’s work and the natural landscape that they’ve retreated into, where they hope to redeem themselves from past mistakes.

Montana

My favorite Montana book this year is Deirdre McNamer‘s concise, poetic novel Red Rover (Viking), in which she examines the emotional fallout caused by the events of World War II among a group of Montanans, spanning from 1927 to 2003.  The mystery at the heart of the book surrounds the death of Aidan Tierney, a Montana man who volunteered for hazardous duty FBI assignment in South America during World War II.  When he returns, he’s ill and diminished, and in 1946 he is found dead of a shotgun wound.  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 his brother Neil, who has returned from his stint as a B-29 pilot, and questions the ruling for decades.

There were also a number of notable paperback releases by Montana writers this year, including two by Rick Bass.  “ title="The University of Nebraska Press">The University of Nebraska Press reissued his 1984 collection of three long stories, Platte River, and the title story contains the sort of twists and turns, melancholy, humor, and natural beauty that are Bass’s trademarks.  Bass’s most recent short story collection, 2006’s The Lives of Rocks (Mariner) came out in paperback a few months ago, and shows him in top form, especially in the title story, a moving tale about an isolated woman struggling with cancer who receives some unexpected visitors, and “Goats,” probably the funniest story Bass has ever written, in which two teenage boys growing up in suburban Houston decide to become cattle barons.

One of the best short story collections I’ve read in a long time is Tom McGuane’s Gallatin Canyon (Vintage Contemporaries), which came out in paperback earlier this year. McGuane is at the top of his game in these tales set in present-day Montana and the Michigan of his youth, and a novella set in Florida. The title story, one of my favorites, is at once a masterfully crafted piece of fiction and a moody evocation of many of the problems and changes that are facing the West today. But far from a diatribe, it subtly employs the weariness of traffic congestion, out-of-control development, and pollution to underscore the difficulties in the primary characters’ relationship.  A sense of humor goes a long way with me, and McGuane can be hilarious, particularly in “Old Friends,” which was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2005.

New Mexico

For New Mexico, the book that won me over this year was Norah Gallagher’s novel Changing Light (Pantheon Books).  I don’t think this beautiful book received half the attention that it deserved. This elegant, elegiac novel is set in Los Alamos, New Mexico, during the final year of World War II, when the world-renown scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were feverishly working on their “gadget.” Changing Light delves into science, theology, and the New Mexico landscape and culture to tell a love story cast against the world-changing forces of history.

Check NewWest.Net/Books tomorrow for Part 2, which will include Oregon, Wyoming, and other Western states.

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