New West Book Review

Gone Fishing: Kim Barnes’ “A Country Called Home”

By Jenny Shank, 9-29-08

A Country Called Home
by Kim Barnes
Alfred A. Knopf, 271 pages, $23.95

Moscow, Idaho writer Kim Barnes’ new novel, A Country Called Home, tells the story of the fallout that occurs when one man checks out of his life and another checks in.  The Idaho wilderness outside the fictional town of Fife plays an active role in the story, its remoteness leading to difficult births, a young mother’s desperation, and a teenager’s loneliness, and its beauty lulling one character into decades of passivity broken only by fishing trips.  Barnes prose is lovely, often incantatory, as she weaves the story of the troubled Deracotte family.

Thomas Deracotte meets Helen when he is a medical student and she is an undergraduate in Connecticut.  Thomas was abandoned by his parents and raised by a grandmother, and worked his way through school with scholarships.  Helen is beautiful and rebellious, and she sees in Thomas the chance to escape the stifling upper-class world of her wealthy family.  She is pregnant by the time they marry, and in 1960 they head out to Idaho, where they have bought property in the wilderness without first visiting it.  They plan to build a cabin and open Thomas’s medical practice in town, living off the grid in a utopian ‘60s sort of way.  In the meantime they camp out in a tent on their rugged property while Helen’s due date approaches, and instead of tackling the work that needs to be done, Thomas spends most of his time in a daze, happily fishing.

Lacking most skills to set up a homestead in the woods, Thomas hires some men to help.  One of them, Manny, is an affable teenager who was raised by rotating families of Fife, in “a kind of communal adoption,” after his mother died and his dad took off.  For the last few years, he has lived by himself in a shack in the woods, and is genuinely comfortable with himself and with the austere conditions he lives in.  He’s taken by Helen, even in her third trimester enormity, but maintains a shy distance at first.

Helen goes into labor earlier than expected and Thomas returns from one of his jaunts in time to deliver his daughter, Elise.  In the months that follow, Thomas shirks his responsibilities as a father and as a companion to Helen, preferring to spend his time fishing, while Helen begins to feel increasingly lonely and isolated.  She enlists Manny to look after Elise for a few hours on occasion, and in one of the book’s great scenes, Helen takes the car that she barely knows how to drive into town, walks into a bar and consumes several margaritas and cigarettes, seeking companionship and release.

Barnes perfectly captures the haze and bodily entrapment of pregnancy and new motherhood, as when she writes:

“Getting ready to go to town was both simple and complicated: a quick sponge bath, a search for a change of clothing that was neither too stained nor too wrinkled…Soon, Elise would awaken and need to be fed.  And again.  And then again.  Helen sometimes felt shackled, any desire she might have to read, explore, even look out over the river stymied by the weight of her breasts emptied but already swelling with new milk, Elise’s cries for more.”

Driven to desperation by Thomas’s neglect, Elise turns to Manny for comfort, and soon there’s an accident that freezes the remaining members of the family in their solitude.  The second half of the book picks up in 1976, when Elise is sixteen.  Manny has stayed with the family as a sort of surrogate uncle for Elise, who is home schooled. Thomas—who finally opened his medical practice in town only to discover that there wasn’t much need for him as the townspeople have long relied on the local pharmacist’s counsel—has become even more spacey and withdrawn.  Just as this situation drove Helen to bouts of recklessness, her daughter in turn grows frustrated with her isolation and engages in extreme behavior.  The people of the town, meanwhile, welcome the Deracotte family with friendliness and concern whenever they wander in from the wilderness.

Barnes’ descriptions of nature are precise and exquisite, such as this one that precedes one of the several births amid the wilderness:

“Late morning.  The rain is nearly done, already a remembered thing.  Swallows rest in their cool fists of mud.  Trout do not rise but hold in the submerged roots of cottonwood.  Rattlesnakes thick with summer vole find fissures in stone, stretch themselves thin.”

Barnes does an effective job of portraying nature’s ability to cast a spell so strong that a person could lose himself or go mad in it, as several of the characters do.  Only steadfast Manny can seem to balance his enthusiasm for the outdoors with his responsibilities to his adopted family. 

A Country Called Home is a compelling drama with multi-faceted characters and arresting prose that will linger with readers after they finish the book.

Kim Barnes will discuss her novel in Portland at Annie Bloom’s Books on October 8 (7:30 p.m.), in Denver at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on October 15 (7:30 p.m.), in Missoula at the Montana Festival of the Book on October 24, and in Moscow at the University of Idaho Law School courtroom on October 29 (7:30 p.m.).

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