New West Book Review
Old and New Montana Clash in Accomplished “Jackalope Dreams”
By Jenny Shank, 3-31-08
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Jackalope Dreams
by Mary Clearman Blew
University of Nebraska Press
390 pages, $24.95
“She’s what, in her late fifties, and that’s the kind estimate,” begins Montana native and University of Idaho professor Mary Clearman Blew’s engrossing new novel, Jackalope Dreams, introducing the reader to its uncommon protagonist, Corey Henry. Corey is a lifelong horsewoman, the only child of the legendary rancher/rodeo champion Loren Henry, and a spinster schoolteacher in the central Montana countryside near Fort Maginnis. As we join Corey, school has just let out not only for summer, but in the immortal words of Alice Cooper, school’s out forever, because a wealthy man from California named Hailey Doggett has moved in, building a 1.5 million dollar house and bringing his daughters, spaced out wife, and creepy brother along.
When 13-year-old Ariel Doggett popped off at Corey in class, she smacked her, which, after the fuss raised by Hailey, resulted in the closing of the Mill Creek school where Corey taught for decades. The next year, all the area children will be sent to a town school, and many other changes are afoot in Blew’s rural Montana, where new-moneyed outsiders buy up land for its beauty while old pioneering ranchers fade away or succumb to foreclosure.
Corey is out of a job and has no prospects of finding one, but that’s not her only problem. The last day of school she rides her horse home to the ranch where she has lived with her crusty, exacting father all her life, apart from a one-year stint in art school, and finds that he has chosen this day to commit suicide with a shotgun in his truck, leaving no note or explanation.
Corey is an isolated figure who spends a lot of time alone, which could have become boring for the reader in less skillful hands, but Blew has solved this problem by having the amusing voices of Corey’s dead family members constantly piping up, such as her grandmother, whenever anyone shows Corey a kindness, saying, “for heaven’s sake don’t dah-de-dah fuss over me,” or more often the cantankerous Loren, who has strong opinions about long-haired boys ("First thing I’d do is take a pair of sheep shears to that hair of his!") and expensive breakfast cereals ("Don’t be bringing home no five-dollar box of that pig swill! Nothing in it but sugar and hot air, hell the goddamn pigs would starve to death on it!").
When Corey notices in passing the unflattering clothing of her friend Annie, who has lived in the area her entire life but was forced to move from the family ranch into a trailer, Corey’s grandmother speaks up, “Well, you wouldn’t expect her to spend extra money on clothes, would you? Like some city woman?” Loren cowed his daughter with his sharp tongue his whole life, practicing the “old strictures, the rationing of words, the careful understatements,” and in his death he can add commentary on even more than he did when alive, reacting to Corey’s private thoughts and intimate moments.
Things begin to get more interesting for Corey, who after her father’s elaborate funeral, can finally emerge from his long shadow. She takes up painting again, feels stirrings of attraction for John Perrine, the lawyer she must hire to sort out her father’s estate, finds the bedraggled Ariel hiding out on her property, looking for food and help at about the same time that Hailey serves Corey with a lawsuit for previously slapping the girl. Intimations of survivalist activities in the area and Perrine’s plan to stage old-fashioned train robberies for tourists keep things hopping in what was once a sleepy rural area.
But judging from the scenario in Jackalope Dreams, there may no longer be many sleepy areas in Montana. As Hailey Doggett’s wife Rita reflects on their recent move, “She and Hailey had looked, but lakefront lots at Whitefish were overpriced, and then too, Whitefish was getting overpopulated. The realtor had let it drop that land around Fort Maginnis, down in Murray County, was undiscovered and still unspoiled an therefore still affordable.” Blew makes clear through her characterizations of old and new residents that in modern Montana, longstanding homesteads where families toiled on the land for hundreds of years, sinking deep roots in the community, have become mere pretty parcels of real estate, changing hands blithely among wealthy outsiders, who like Hailey Doggett, might decorate their homes with an ironic jackalope head.
There are many separate plot threads in Jackalope Dreams, and Blew handles most of them deftly. The climax is sufficiently exciting, but at the end of the book there remain a few murky elements--the activities and motivations behind the survivalist-drug den never becomes as vivid and authentic as do the portraits of the lives of the longstanding residents. Near the end a very minor character harms a major character, and the implications of this incident are not well explained or explored. But Blew gets so much right, from her beautiful, clear prose to her sharp humor to her rich characterizations, that in the end Jackalope Dreams satisfies, and as we leave Corey Henry, she still has plenty of problems, but she has the energy to tackle them after having been reborn.
Mary Clearman Blew will read from Jackalope Dreams at Chapter One Book Store in Hamilton on April 23 at 7 p.m.
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