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Tag Archives: Montana

Escaping a Predator: The Widow Nash

23 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1904, American West, book review, historical fiction, Jamie Harrison, literary fiction, masochism, Montana, over-the-top characterizations, sexual double standard, sociopathy

Review: The Widow Nash, by Jamie Harrison
Counterpoint, 2017. 373 pp. $26

It’s 1904, and Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey has just buried her grandmother in the East and wants nothing more than to retrieve her bearings. But a summons comes from Seattle, one she can’t ignore: Her father, Walton, is losing his mind to tertiary syphilis, likely dying. More importantly to the two men who send for her, Walton has misplaced or hidden or spent a fortune reaped from the sale of African mines, and part of that money is due them. Dulcy, as she’s known, is essential to the task of deciphering Walton’s notebooks and figuring out what he did with the money, for she’s traveled the world with him and knows his secrets. Or so they believe.

Their conviction brings much misery to Dulcy, and here lies the biggest flaw of this often splendid, engaging novel. Victor Maslingen, her former fiancé, imprisons Dulcy in Seattle, and his henchman, Henning Falk, immediately welches on the promises he made to keep Victor in check. Surprisingly, Dulcy never even protests, only sets out to care for her father, living up to her second name, Cordelia.

Moreover, if she’s ever regretted breaking her engagement, all you need to know is that Henning has furnished Victor’s office with objects that don’t break if they’re thrown. Unfortunately, people aren’t as sturdy; and Dulcy’s first name, Leda, suggests what Victor has done before and keeps threatening to do again. In fact, Victor is such a completely unappealing, unbalanced character, he could fill a page in the DSM by himself. And the strange part is, nobody who knows him (other than Henning) can understand why Dulcy threw him over. To a degree, her reticence to share the story is quite understandable. As Harrison shows, a woman may be the soul of virtue, but society will still condemn her for lodging such an accusation.

Nevertheless, the central conflict of this novel results from two clichéd characterizations, a masochist and a sociopath, and during the long Seattle narrative, little changes. We get Dulcy’s sufferings and discursions into Walton’s past life and travels with his daughter, some of which is interesting, much of it simply appalling, as when Walton carelessly and unconscionably passes his syphilis to his wife, killing the children she bears subsequently and later, herself. Meanwhile, the main narrative treads water while Dulcy works up the courage to escape, and you may be forgiven for wondering when she’s going to get it.

Yet The Widow Nash is about running away, and round about page 120, Dulcy manages to rescue herself and the novel. Unfortunately, Harrison wants you to believe that Victor will pursue Dulcy if he ever traces her — that’s why he has to be a sociopath, I suppose —and that Henning, who’s far more practical and therefore more dangerous, will help. Or maybe he won’t, because he has a soul and a conscience when the narrative absolutely requires. That’s the trouble with over-the-top characters; they can’t bend, so everyone else has to, even in illogical directions.

Henry Wellge’s 1904 photo of Butte, Montana, population 60,000 (courtesy Library of Congress)

When Dulcy settles in a Montana town, assuming the name Mrs. Nash and declaring her widowhood, the novel settles in too. How she keeps her secret from the nosy matrons makes a wry, entertaining narrative, and though predators flourish here — most especially the chief of police — there’s good-heartedness that Dulcy drinks in and wonders whether she’s dreaming. Most fiction about the American prairie that I’ve read stresses how plain and boring life can be, but where Dulcy lives, there’s never a dull moment.

One reason Harrison can get away with a few mistakes and still come out with a good novel is that her prose evokes not just a setting, but a way of life:

Walton packed an India rubber bath, which liked to collapse suddenly, and his medicines often shattered, the fumes poisoning fellow travelers. Travel meant being wet and cold or dry and hot;… Pushy, mustachioed men in uniform, demanding imaginary paperwork at sudden borders; dusty telegraph offices and banks with wayward hours and false coinage; mysterious meat, leathery fruit.… insects skittering over mattresses or rappelling down at high speed from dark ceilings, the flutter of bats and whisper of mice.… He’d opened the wide world for her but sluiced away her joy.

And though the world of this novel is a very violent one, the people Dulcy meets in Montana have a zest for life, or many do, and that’s just what she needs, having been beaten down so long. I think that Harrison could have gotten to that point much sooner and more directly, and if that meant jettisoning discussions of Walton’s pseudoscientific theories about volcanoes and earthquakes and the interconnection of all human events, so much the better. I think the themes of The Widow Nash are well established without that. But if you can get past these excesses and the clunky narrative machinery before Dulcy’s escape, the novel offers rewards.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Cowboy Ethics: As Good As Gone

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1960s, book review, cowboys, historical fiction, Kirk Douglas, Larry Watson, literary fiction, machismo, melodrama, Montana, narration, Old West, subplots, vigilante justice

Review: As Good As Gone, by Larry Watson
Algonquin, 2016. 341 pp. $27

To an outsider, it might seem as if little of the 1960s have touched Gladstone, Montana. But to Calvin Sidey, an aging, tough-minded cowboy who withdrew from the town years ago to live alone on its outskirts, the world of 1963 has taken over. Even on a brief drive through, he recognizes few landmarks, and mentioning the names of people he once knew raises puzzled looks or brings the news that this one has died, while the other lives in a nursing home.

Bozeman, Montana, city hall, fire station, and opera house, built 1890, demolished, 1966 (Courtesy Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons)

Bozeman, Montana, city hall, fire station, and opera house, built 1890, demolished, 1966 (Courtesy Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons)

Calvin wouldn’t have ventured into Gladstone at all, if his estranged son, Bill, hadn’t asked him to watch over the grandkids while Bill and his wife, Marjorie, go to Missoula so that she can have an operation. Nobody likes this arrangement. Bill resents Calvin for abandoning him and his sister after their mother died; Marjorie doesn’t trust Calvin to fulfill his responsibilities; and Calvin would rather bite the head off a rattlesnake than stay in Gladstone or, worse, have to talk to his son. Then again, Calvin hates talking to anybody.

Naturally, plenty will happen during Bill and Marjorie’s absence, putting Calvin and everyone around him under pressure. As Good As Gone would have been better had much less happened, but I like Watson’s premise, which gives his protagonist plenty of scope. I also believe the look and feel of Gladstone, from the dive bars to the stores, the weather, the cooking, the small-town atmosphere, and the social attitudes, the latter rendered with a light touch. The characters sense that they should be more tolerant, but they can’t bring themselves to act that way, and whatever’s happening in the world–civil rights marches, protests–is all Out There someplace, lurking on the edge of consciousness.

While Bill and Marjorie are away, Calvin charges at conflicts rather than step aside, because that’s who he is. When a neighbor’s dog gets into the garbage cans and strews litter all over–a chronic problem, he hears–Calvin tells the neighbor that if it happens again, he’ll shoot the dog. Such is his reputation that the neighbors pick up the trash and keep the dog leashed. Calvin also rushes into action when an irate tenant (Bill’s a real estate agent who owns rental property) barges into the Sidey home to scream about an eviction notice. I don’t have to tell you that the young man stalking Calvin’s beautiful, seventeen-year-old granddaughter, had better watch his step; that confrontation is set up almost from the get-go.

There’s more–the widow next door who takes a fancy to Calvin; his sensitive grandson, Will, bullied by his so-called friends; Marjorie’s operation (a hysterectomy), which goes wrong, or appears to; and Bill’s ache for the father who’s remained out of reach. Six narrators tell this story, of uneven range and strength; except for the widow, the women’s voices seem insubstantial. Moreover, the presence of six narrators implies many subplots to keep spinning, two of which have little or nothing to do with the main narrative.

The myriad threads obscure the fabric of what matters most: Calvin’s grief over his dead wife, which led him to abandon his kids, and how Bill feels about that. Part of the problem is that Watson can’t seem to decide which to focus on, Calvin’s character or Bill’s loss of him. But either way, though the narrative mentions what these men feel and describes them having the feelings, they abruptly leave off grappling with them, and each other. Rather, events represent emotions, and only in that way do the characters take them in.

For instance, Bill fears for Marjorie’s life, and that his mother’s death will be repeated. His fear is irrational, and he knows it, but that’s how deeply he’s been scarred. Life feels fragile to him, and everything he has can be swept away. Unfortunately, Watson fiddles with this very human paradox, as if he can’t bear to let a rational man have an irrational fear; my God, what will the reader think of him? So melodrama takes over: Marjorie slips into a brief coma, and it appears, for awhile, that she might actually die.

In fact, melodrama undoes much fine work in As Good As Gone, for many chapters end just before impending violence, a cliff-hanger technique that resembles the Westerns whose myths Watson wishes to debunk. Calvin’s courage and willingness to act are admirable, but his stubborn refusal to listen to anyone else, his code of vigilante justice, and the way he equates softer, human feelings with weakness leads to trouble. These are compelling themes, and as I read, I couldn’t help thinking of Lonely Are the Brave, a terrific 1962 film starring Kirk Douglas. I only wish that Watson had used his gift for economy to better effect, much as the movie did.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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