Reviews & Essays
New West Classic Essay
Nature Wins in Thomas Savage’s “The Pass”
The Pass
by Thomas Savage
Riverbend Publishing, 335 pages, $12.95
I'd never heard of Thomas Savage until I came across Riverbend Publishing and the Drumlummon Institute's recent reprint of 1944's The Pass, and after falling into this beautiful, multi-layered, funny, heart-wrenching novel of the Montana prairie, I'm kicking myself for not reading his books sooner. Savage was the author of thirteen novels. Born in Utah in 1915, he grew up in Horse Prairie, Montana and Lemhi, Idaho, spent brief stints in Missoula and Portland, Ore., then lived most of the rest of his life on the east coast until his death in 2003. But like Willa Cather, he set much of his fiction in the West where he grew up, and his first novel, 1944's The Pass, shares Cather's themes of the tight communities that form in isolated stretches of prairie and a reverence for the beauty of the open land coupled with a respect for the hardships that living there can bring. Annie Proulx is a Savage admirer; she wrote the afterword for a recent edition of his 1967 novel Power of the Dog, and describes The Pass in this way:
"Savage's first novel, The Pass, is shot through with the deepest kind of landscape description which utterly controls the destinies and fortunes of the ranchers and Scandinavian farmers who settle on the prairie adjacent to a formidable pass. The people of the place love it beyond reason, the blue autumnal haze, the grassland stretched out, and they relish testing themselves against spring storms and baking drought. The novel is studded with brilliant portraits that already display Savage's masterly ability to show the inner lives of characters, especially women, who are treated with a rare depth of understanding."
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New West Book Review
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Kevin Canty’s “Where the Money Went”
Where the Money Went
by Kevin Canty
Nan A. Talese, 191 pages, $25
The title story of Missoula writer Kevin Canty's new collection Where the Money Went sets the tone and theme for the book, with its wry, sad-funny accounting of a busted-up marriage. "When the thing was over, Braxton sat down at the kitchen table of his apartment and tried to figure out what they had done with the money," it begins. In less than two pages, Canty provides a clear picture of this family that formed, consumed, and then dissolved, spending money on "cars, landscaping, clothes, vacations" on its way out of existence. Most of the stories revolve around a lonely male narrator who made a hash of some prior romantic relationship or is about to trash his current one. It would all be pretty depressing if Canty wasn't so funny.
"The Birthday Girl" serves as an example of Canty working at his best. It kicks off with a vivid, immediate start: "Saturday Night at the Sip 'n' Dip: Piano Pat is bellowing out her 35,000th rendition of 'Take Me Home, Country Roads' while the college boys and girls—home for Christmas, stuck in town till New Year's—suck mixed drinks off the piano-top bar and sing along. It's ten o'clock or ten-thirty and the snow is coming down like a freight train outside. I get a Daniel's ditch to go and take it back to the room, not without regret."
Kevin Canty will read from his new collection in Seattle at Elliot Bay Book Co. on August 4 (7:30 p.m.) and in Portland at Powell's on Hawthorne on August 6 (7:30 p.m.).
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New West Book Review
Bad Behavior: Maile Meloy’s “Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It”
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It
By Maile Meloy
Riverhead, 219 pages, $25.95
Some writers achieve their effect on the reader through surface finery: poetic frills, dazzling description, or a quirky voice. Maile Meloy doesn't go in for that sort of thing, which is why when she gets you by the throat or heart, as she does in every story in her second story collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, you never see it coming. The way a good seamstress hides her work by making her stitches neat on top and bottom, Meloy writes clean prose that seems like it must have been effortless to construct until after you've finished reading the story and you realize the psychological complexity of the tale she's told.
Meloy grew up in Helena, and many of the stories in this collection are set in Montana. Even when the stories occur in that sparsely populated state, Meloy skips the nature and zeroes in the people, portraying how they yearn for and torture one another when placed in close proximity. One of the best stories in the collection is the lead-off piece, "Travis, B.," about a young polio-stricken ranch hand named Chet Moran who "walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question." Shy because of his ailments, Chet takes lonesome jobs feeding livestock in winter, and he's working one such job in Glendive, near the North Dakota border, when he gets stir crazy and drives into town. He notices people going into the school building, so he follows them, where he finds a "tired and nervous" young woman named Beth Travis teaching an education law class.
Maile Meloy will appear in Missoula at the Montana Festival of the Book on October 22 at the Wilma Theater.
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New West Book Review
Tracing One Woman’s Footsteps, Seeing Colorado in a New Way
Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now
By Robert Root
University of Oklahoma Press, $19.95, 306 pages
In Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now, Robert Root becomes a model “migrant flatlander” by making an adventure of his move to Colorado’s Front Range from central Michigan. Root’s wife takes on a new job in Denver, and he follows, but readers of this book will soon discover that its author isn’t content to sit around and do yard work in his retirement.
Instead, Root immerses himself in Colorado’s natural and literary history and sets out to explore his new surroundings including the state’s hiking trails, back roads, and high peaks. Root models his travels after those of bold British traveler Isabella Bird, who visited the Colorado Territory in 1873 and wrote about what she discovered in her classic travel narrative A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.
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New West Book Review
Dad in the Woods: Rick Bass’s “The Wild Marsh”
The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana
By Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 384 pages, $26
Rick Bass has written many books about his home territory of the Yaak Valley in Montana, but The Wild Marsh proves that he has plenty of original ideas left to say about it. In his fiction, Bass often spins tales about people who live in remote wilderness areas, and in his nonfiction, Bass has advocated for the preservation of the Yaak (as in last year's National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated Why I Came West), and chronicled his relationship with his hunting dogs (Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had).
The Wild Marsh is something more personal yet, a journal of his observations about living in this wilderness, presented in month-by-month fashion. Some of the most insightful and heartfelt passages address a topic he hasn't dwelled on much in previous work: his daughters and his role as a dad who wants the world for his kids, a world he hopes will be as full of wild animals, plants, and berries as the one he has known.
Rick Bass will discuss "The Wild Marsh" at Chapter One Books in Hamilton, Mont. on Monday, July 13, 7 p.m.
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New West Book Review
Patrolling the Northern Border: Jim Lynch’s “Border Songs”
Border Songs
By Jim Lynch
Alfred A. Knopf, 291 pages, $25.95
Strange things are going on around the border between Washington state and British Columbia in Jim Lynch's rich, imaginative novel Border Songs. On the Canadian side, retired professor Wayne Rousseau enjoys flaunting his access to medical marijuana treatment for his MS and decrying the follies of the U.S. government, and his daughter Madeline falls in with some pot smugglers, leaving a job at a nursery to become the drug operation's head grower. Across the ditch on the U.S. side, Norm Vanderkool's dairy is in dire straights, his wife is losing her memory, and the cows are succumbing to mysterious ailments.
At Norm's insistence, the Vanderkools' son Brandon has just joined the Border Patrol, and he's an odd duck: six-foot-eight and dyslexic, he has trouble stringing words together in the proper order and has never fit in with regular people—his crush, Madeline, describes him as "an innocent." But he's a champion noticer, bird watching and creating art out of nature's materials when he's out on patrol. His careful observations of the land and birds cause him to be attuned to anything that's amiss, and he begins to discover droves of people of all nationalities trying to illegally cross the border into the U.S., many of them smuggling pot, guns, or worse. After a string of serendipitous busts, Brandon earns a nickname on the B.P.: "shit magnet."
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New West Book Review
Memoir of a Climbing Widow: Jennifer Lowe-Anker’s “Forget Me Not”
Forget Me Not
by Jennifer Lowe-Anker
Mountaineers Books, 256 pages, $24.95
In Forget Me Not, Jennifer Lowe-Anker chronicles life with her first husband Alex Lowe, who was thought by many to be the world’s best mountain climber before he was lost in an avalanche in the Tibetan Himalayas in 1999. Her memoir, comprehensive and faithful, does his life of achievement great justice, and is surprisingly upbeat even as she attempts to answer some of the darker questions associated with his vocation. As she examines Alex’s childhood as well as their courtship—when his profession as a mountain climber first took shape—she wonders how Alex became such an intense leader and climber, risking his life again and again, and, in his case, even with a family waiting at home.
At the beginning of the book, Lowe-Anker writes of Alex’s heart, that it was “frequently and most definitely in conflict with itself.” And at the end of the book, Lowe-Anker states that the writing of this memoir has been cathartic. Though her main aim is to memorialize the grandness of Alex’s success and scope, she also ends up describing the troubling fact that she was often left alone to raise three boys. She grapples with why she was attracted to such a life in the first place, and then why she was so understanding—so much so that Alex himself dubbed her “Saint Jennifer.”
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New West Book Review
Multi-Cultural in the Monochromatic West: A Novel For a Contemporary Denver
Children of the Waters
by Carleen Brice
One World/Ballantine, 304 pages, $14
Denver novelist Carleen Brice's second novel is a quick-paced family drama that turns on a secret adoption, told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of two sisters who are unknown to each other, living in the same city but in very different worlds. Trish Taylor is a blond, overweight veterinary technician who came back to her hometown of Aurora, Colo. after her marriage failed, bringing her biracial teenage son Will with her. Trish was told her mother and infant sister died in a car accident when she was a preschooler, and her stern grandparents raised her. Billie Cousins is the cherished daughter of a successful Denver African-American family. Her mother is a Reynelda Muse-like local television anchor, and her father is the dean of the business school at the University of Colorado. Through a newly discovered letter and a visit to an old neighbor, Trish learns that Billie is the sister she thought died in infancy, and tracks her down, disrupting both their lives.
Carleen Brice will discuss her new book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on July 16 at 7:30 p.m.
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New West Book Review
Disappearing Act: Candida Lawrence’s “Vanishing”
Vanishing
by Candida Lawrence
275 pages, $23.95
Candida Lawrence's new Vanishing is a collection of incisive, chronologically arranged personal essays that plunge the reader into vivid moments of her past, beginning in 1942 when Candida is in college at Berkeley and is a reporter for the Daily Cal, and extending into recent times, when she is coping with aging and adjusting to a changed world. Like Mary Gordon, Lawrence writes with great candor, wit, and intelligence about her family. Lawrence lives in Mill Valley, California, and is the author of three previous memoirs. As she reveals in one of the most arresting pieces in the book, "Vanishing: 1965," Lawrence spent years hiding out under an assumed identity after she took off with her children in the wake of a messy divorce which had left her with very limited visitation rights. This is perhaps why, as revelatory as these essays are, they still bear an air of mystery.
Lawrence writes bracing prose, mainly in present tense, replete with precise detail; the effect of this approach is that the reader feels as though sitting right beside her in 1965 when she flies to San Diego with $500 for an abortion in Mexico. "We rent a 1965 Ford Sedan, blue with a white interior, AM-FM radio, and a clock that works," she writes. "I sit primly on the dazzling vinyl and feel small." In Tijuana, they wait in a parking lot for a station wagon that comes to take women to a clinic. Lawrence's descriptions of the people with her on that ride provide a cross section of women in the same situation:
"To my right is Black Woman, calm, dignified. Next to Black Woman is a young girl…dressed in faded jeans…Her eyes are red from recent weeping and seem about to spill over again. Facing Young Girl on the bench opposite, is an older woman in a light-blue pants suit…I would have guessed her to be too old for this trip, but perhaps she has similar thoughts about me."
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New West Book Review
Birdman: Rachel Dickinson’s “Falconer on the Edge”
Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West
by Rachel Dickinson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 220 pages, $24
In Falconer on the Edge, Rachel Dickinson gives readers an in-depth look at a subculture that many people may not be aware existed. Falconers are an intense, passionate, tight-knit group of bird-loving hunters, and they subdivide themselves according to the type of bird they fly, from those who favor hunting sage grouse with gyrfalcon-peregrine hybrids ("an überbird [with] stamina and speed and beauty") to those who fly hawks to catch squirrels and jackrabbits. The falconers Dickinson depicts remind me of a more athletic and outdoorsy version of Trekkies, with their conventions, cliques, private jargon derived from Norman French, and the way they are often misunderstood by outsiders.
Although falconry ("a loose term [that] refers to flying any kind of raptor or bird of prey") originated perhaps 3,500 years ago in the Middle East, spread through Asia and Europe, and didn't catch on in North America until the twentieth century, it seems a pastime tailor-made for the American West, as it requires a lot of open space and abundant game. With all the care and training that a bird of prey demands, not to mention the need for the falconer to be in top condition to run through fields after his bird, it might be the most labor and time-intensive variety of hunting, which is why so few practice it. Dickinson writes, "Today there are approximately forty-five hundred licensed falconers in the United States, and two to three thousand of them belong to [the North American Falconers Association]." Judging from the portraits in Dickinson's book, there are no casual falconers.
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