Country Livin': Three writers grapple with heroes and villains in the American backwoods Originally published in The Bookpress, February 2000. Fencing the Sky by James Galvin. Holt, 1999. 258 pages, $23.00 The Long Home by William Gay. MacMurray & Beck, 1999. 257 pages, $24.95 Plainsong by Kent Haruf. Knopf, 1999. 301 pages, $24.00 Who would have thought? 1999 seemed destined to become the year of the 900-page literary techno-thriller, but instead it brought us a glance over our collective shoulder: books about the past, about small towns, about ethical dilemmas. Ha Jin won the National Book Award with his quiet Waiting; Chang-Rae Lee wrote about the echoes of the Second World War in A Gesture Life. New books about rural America, and about its attendant social codes, arrived from Annie Proulx, Laura Hendrie, Robert Morgan, Chris Offutt and others. One can hardly blame writers and readers—the thing in us that wants stories, seems to want stories about moral conflict. But in our present climate of artificial consensus, technological gee-whizzery, and (let's be honest) rampant greed, it's often difficult to tell what's right and what's not. Americans are clinging with a kind of desperation to any and all narrative that allows them to take a side: courtroom television, the President's impeachment, the O.J. Simpson trial. Enter the resurgence of country fiction. Books about rural America have an inherent appeal for the contemporary reader: they enfold him in a stark, self-contained moral universe, in which a complex story can be acted out simply and clearly. There's something about the prairie, the woods, the mountains that streamlines and magnifies dramatic tension. This is a mixed blessing for the writer: while it's easier to present difficult situations in a setting unencumbered by television, cell phones or the internet, it's also harder to cover one's tracks if the task proves too daunting. A writer's mistakes are as naked as her successes. In this sense, then, these writers are doing something quite daring, ignoring the tools of obfuscation available to them and laying their stories on the line. They meet, inevitably, with varying success. The most celebrated and, to my taste, least compelling of these books is Kent Haruf's Plainsong, a novel about small-town Colorado. It is a charming, rambling walk through the lives of regular folks: Tom Guthrie, a schoolteacher struggling to raise two boys in the absence of their mother, who has become depressed and left town; Victoria Roubideaux, a pregnant teenager; the McPheron brothers, two elderly bachelor farmers who take her in; Maggie Jones, Tom's fellow teacher and Victoria's advocate; and a host of other, minor characters. Haruf has got a seductive narrative voice: eloquent, unpretentious, it shows exactly what things look like and exactly what people are doing. Here's Maggie, drinking coffee: "She sipped from her coffee and tasted it and looked in the cup again and set it back on the table." Nice. The lack of commas gives every element of the sentence equal weight; this character actually gets to taste the coffee she's drinking. That is Haruf's aim here, I think; you're supposed to taste every drop of his book. And except for some excesses—a few too many chapters begin with descriptions of light or buildings, and we begin to feel a little too strongly that Haruf wants us not simply to see, but to worship, the small-town west—the book tastes pretty good. That said, Plainsong does not prove very nourishing. There are several plot lines here, mostly revolving around Tom and Victoria, the two main characters (who know each other but rarely meet). We have Tom's anxiety about the boys, Ike and Bobby; Tom's gradual estrangement from his wife and his growing feelings for Maggie; Tom's conflict with a student that eventually results in a violent episode. Victoria's mother kicks her out of the house; she stays with Maggie for awhile; Maggie arranges to have her live with the McPherons; and then she and the McPherons must learn to get along. We also follow Ike and Bobby as they wander around: they deliver papers, they peek into an abandoned house where two boys (one of them Tom's tormentor) have sex with a dispirited girl, they suffer a grand humiliation at the hands of the same boys, compounding Tom's troubles. Haruf is trying to convince us that regular lives are the stuff of literature, are in fact kind of heroic. It's so pleasing to read him that we want to believe it. But we can't. The reason Plainsong seems so successful is that it never taxes itself. This is a book full of good people whose problems come from bad people, and it is telling that the narrative, which is in the third person, only ever gets into the heads of the good people, as if Haruf knows that were he to crack open his villains' skulls he would find only sawdust. Of course Haruf makes some gestures toward moral ambiguity in his characters, but these are perfunctory. Tom has a one-night stand with a woman in a bar and feels bad about it. He yells at the boys once or twice. At the book's end, he gets into a fistfight with his student's family, though we have been fully prepped to accept this as an understandable lapse. Victoria, of course, has gotten pregnant. She abandons the McPherons in favor of the father of her baby (we cannot see any reason why, as the boy is utterly unappealing in every scene), but fifty pages later she comes back. Least plausible are Ike and Bobby, who are more or less the same person, separated only by name. Their mother leaves them, they are nearly raped, their favorite horse dies, but never does a cruel or angry impulse enter their heads, and they treat each other with a level of kindness and respect never before seen between brothers on this earth. They even befriend a friendless old woman and run errands for her. I find particularly annoying Haruf's transferrence of their father's despair to the wayward student: instead of Tom himself lashing out at the boys and having to grapple with the consequences, Haruf has the student, who hates Tom, do it instead. That way it's just sort of Tom's fault. But not really. This is only one of the many missed opportunities in the book. Elsewhere, the good McPherons (wonderfully funny characters, by the way) are backhandedly accused of harboring Victoria for selfish reasons: namely, to have sex with her. It's not true, but I couldn't help but wonder: is there some sexual tension there? If not, how come? Are the old bachelors really strangers to desire? And what of the townspeople—are they really so polite that they would let the brothers' good deed go unpunished? As if Haruf can't bear the thought of this injustice a second longer, the rumors are quickly dismissed and nothing comes of them. Ultimately, this book is a shade too nice, too full of reassuring (if comely) platitudes and intergenerational chumminess. Haruf seems to lack the will to let his characters make real mistakes, to let the bad things that happen to them have any lasting effect. Perhaps he thinks this would be a cruel way to treat his characters. But the result is a bit of a cheat, a skillful work that nonetheless smacks of wish fulfillment, rather than of the truth. William Gay, on the other hand, has no problem with a little cruelty. The Long Home has been compared by some reviewers to William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, presumably because it contains violence and long sentences and is set in the south. Fair enough, though I think Gay's real model is Joyce: the book is full of invented compound words—"halflistening," "justpicked," "squirrelhunting"—, is scantly punctuated, has a self-conscious sense of modern mythologizing, and, as in Ulysses, features as its main players a fatherless son and a sonless father. Reviewers have also implied that the book is a challenge to read, that it is at times dense and impenetrable but ultimately rewarding. The book is often rewarding, but the impenetrability is temporary and, I think, not intentional but the result of poor editing. To be blunt: the first 75 pages of this book are a mess. The Long Home is a first novel, and it reads as if Gay reworked the beginning over and over again before at last finding a way to go on. These initial pages are full of dull overdescription, the result of the writer not quite trusting his considerable gifts. "He felt restless, bemused, time was a commodity in short supply and he must ration it," Gay writes. An old man is "aged by the ceaseless traffic of the years," which is not a bit more illuminating than simply "aged." More bothersome are frequent repetitions of identical or similar phases: the first paragraph contains both the "bowels of the earth" and the "hollows of the world"; rocks and rain fall "plumb" within a page of one another; the word "some" appears with shocking frequency (in two pages: "some grievous wrong," "the shadow of something dread," "like some perverse host," "like some grim specter," "from some reversal of the seasons"). But after that Gay finds his voice and the prose is sharp and haunting and confident, and the book turns out to be a sloppy but serious piece of work. In the opening pages, we meet a man named Hovington, who discovers after a storm that a giant bottomless hole, reeking of brimstone, has opened up in his yard. He thinks he hears voices in it. This is in 1933, somewhere in the rural south. Hovington becomes ill and ends up staying in bed for ten years. Meanwhile, another man has moved in and taken up with Hovington's wife; his name is Hardin and he is evil. When a third man, Winer, shows up to complain about the still Hardin is operating on his property, Hardin kills him and throws his body into the bottomless pit. Then, in 1943, there is another storm, which washes Winer's skull out of the pit. The skull is found by Oliver, an old man with an outlaw past. Oliver befriends young Nathan Winer, the dead man's son, who believes that his father simply walked out on him and his mother ten years before; this perceived abandonment is driving Mrs. Winer mad with bitterness and Nathan out of the house for good. The book's central conflict arises when Nathan is hired to do some carpentry work on a roadhouse Hardin is building (he still doesn't know that Hardin killed his father). Hovington's daughter Amber Rose catches his eye and he falls in love with her. But Hardin has plans for Amber Rose: he wants to be her pimp. Tension escalates between Hardin and Nathan. Meanwhile, Oliver, who lost a young son years before, realizes that Nathan is in considerable danger and plots to save him from Hardin. There are a lot of good things about this novel. Gay loves language, and though it does not always serve him well (it is embarrassing to learn that Amber Rose performs fellatio "like some spectral succubus feasting"), he is capable of beautiful turns of phrase. He is a whiz when it comes to dialogue; his characters' words, full of cadence and wit, are undulled by popular culture. "Looks like you been cleanin out a ditch-run or two," Nathan says to his directionless friend Motormouth, when the latter's beat-up Chrysler heaves into view. "Well, they never did build the roads to suit where I wanted to drive," is the reply. Each character is psychologically complex (with one exception) and utterly distinct; many of the best scenes in the book involve minor, but still compelling, figures. There is the effete, helmeted poultry farmer, Weiss, who, when Nathan wakes him up by saying "It's morning. The sun's way up," responds with "Fuck the sun." There is Leo Huggins, the self-aggrandizing cookware salesman who hoodwinks Nathan's mother, and the amiable thug Buttcut, who loves beating people up. This brings up another good thing about Gay: unlike Cormac McCarthy, he's funny. This is a valuable quality in a book about fighting the devil, who I think Hardin is supposed to be. And that, of course, is the problem here. Hardin is so bad, so absurdly villainous, that there's never really any doubt about where the book is going; we know that good will have to triumph over evil, that Hardin will have to get his. And he does—though not, to Gay's credit, in quite the way we expect. Everyone in The Long Home is pretty much who we think they are, so that the suspense arises from plot and not from character. There's no doubt that Hardin is going to be mean; we are left with only the question of what form his meanness will take. This gets a bit boring. But not completely. Gay is no spring chicken, and the impression he leaves us is not of youthful naiveté. His observations are mature, even wise, and he makes a lot of them. The fabric of this book, then, is utterly compelling—so what if the whole garment fits a little funny. Gay is supposed to have another book coming, and I'm eager to see what he does now that he knows how to write a novel; if the confidence he displays in the middle sections of The Long Home could be sustained throughout an entire book, that book might be very good indeed. If Gay and Haruf fell prey, in their quest for heroes, to the temptation of unambiguous villains, James Galvin at least saw it coming. His villain, a land developer, is as evil as anybody's, but is wrapped in a postmodern allegory of the contemporary American west, and is dead by page five. What ensues is a self-conscious meta-western, complete with an anti-hero: an ex-hippie turned cowboy turned outlaw turned martyr. The novel, Fencing the Sky, is a heady brew, fragmented in time and point of view, that bugged me and bugged me until I suddenly realized, about ten pages from the end, that I kind of loved it. Galvin is the author of one great book about the west: The Meadow, a fractured memoir about the life of his friend Lyle Van Waning, about Van Waning's death and the death of his independent way of life on the high plains of Wyoming. Fencing the Sky is arranged much like The Meadow, in brief anecdotal episodes separated by white spaces and by years, and like that book is fairly short. Galvin may be best known as a poet, and both books are marked by a lovely economy of language. Over and over he uses the right words. "Snow ghosts slaked over the red galactic grit of the county road, the prairie a rough sea of drifts, blowing snow a blue fuzz, electric, over them." What's so good about this is that, if you're barely paying attention to the strange word choices, you can still picture what Galvin is trying to show you. But if you slow down and think about it—"Snow ghosts slaked"? "galactic grit"?—you are privy to the enigmatic, evocative quality that makes Galvin's prose his own. It is like a Chuck Close portrait, both representational and abstract at once. These forays into lyricism are fairly rare, though; what makes the prose really shine is its rhythm, the way it employs simple words in shapely patterns. I can choose a passage nearly at random— They were up on the stack. They were stacking. Mike had showed up and was throwing bales up to them from the flatbed. Corners tied, cracks covered, the last stack was up. They'd been loading and stacking since noon and it was getting dark. Oscar said, "I noticed you holding yourself kinda longways and crooked as if there was something wrong with your back." —and it will be sure and clear and kinetic, imbued with a wry, effortless humor. The plot: Fencing the Sky opens with a killing. Mike, our anti-hero, the ex-hippie, is out looking for some missing cows that have been spotted by his friend Ad, the doctor. He discovers Merry, our villain, the land developer, chasing them with his ATV. Impulsively, Mike ropes Merry around the neck and yanks him off the three-wheeler. Mike's other friend, Oscar, the phlegmatic rancher, shows up and notes that Merry is dead. Mike decides to get out of town. The story, such as it is, follows Mike and his horse, Potatoes, as they flee toward some unknown destination, with an Indian tracker, Jim, close on their heels. As Mike rides he considers his life as an activist and Marxist, his life without Liv, his wife, thrown by a horse long ago and killed. We learn, from narrative departures labeled by year, about the lives of all the major players. There is not much more to it. Whenever we see Mike, he's still riding, and Jim is still tracking. We wonder, of course, if Mike will be caught (gradually it comes to seem inevitable), and we wonder where he's headed. But the point of Fencing the Sky isn't the plot; the point is the gradual illumination of character and place, which Galvin gives us through anecdotes, memories, and jarring authorial intrusions. That's right: authorial intrusions. Imagine reading, on page 13 of a western, this line: "He saw himself from a distance with authorial intrusion." Or a couple pages before that: "If Joe had known what a metaphor was, he'd have thought he had experienced a metaphor." Or this one: "Look what he'd come to. The brave cowboy. The honest outlaw. . . . Mike saw himself becoming a formula, and it was a sad one." Galvin makes no bones about his presence in this book: he is telling the story, and you are reading it. He has chopped up that story into a thousand little pieces, and he feeds them to you seemingly at random, all the while reminding you that it's him doing so and not a little voice in your head. If you regard this tactic with suspicion, even hostility, you're right to do so. The last thing we need is another self-aggrandizing po-mo backscratcher who doesn't know how to spin a yarn. But stick with Galvin: he's bringing you someplace worthwhile. That place is the dying west of the present day, where ranches owned and worked by the same people for a century are being carved up by developers and sold off in pieces to seasonal residents who drive expensive cars. The author, as you might guess, is not happy about this. He gives us a veritable war's worth of skirmishes between the new world and the old: newcomers who don't like all the cows hanging around; aimless moneyed teenage vandals; trespassing cement trucks, and the uglification of the landscape, and hunters who don't know how to fire guns. Galvin is utterly unabashed about his polemics. When he wants to let us know how he feels about land stewardship as it relates to environmental preservation, he invents a character, Marty, to get up in front of a crowd and give a speech about it. Seriously: there's a speech in this book, follwed by a question-and-answer period. Elsewhere, a character pulls an encylopedia at random off a shelf and opens it to the entry on the Homestead Act of 1862, which he reads aloud. Later, somebody reads an article in a doctor's office on the cultural emasculation of the cowboy. Perhaps this doesn't sound like your cup of tea, and maybe it isn't. But Galvin is a man who makes you want to listen. He is a born persuader and a real artist, and his authority with words alone warrants close attention. If his ranchers occasionally seem unconvincingly blameless (who is it, exactly, selling all this land to developers?), they are, at the same time, authentic in their eccentricities, their loyalies, their grudging empathy for their enemy. Now, about that enemy. Merriweather Snipes is ridiculous in his callousness and greed; his very name—with its shadows of both snipers and the family Snopes, and of Merriweather Lewis, the original eastern interloper—is what we fiction-workshop veterans call "over the top." He lives in a geodesic dome. He drives a SUV. He talks on a cell phone. At one point, he is shown—I am not kidding—reading and dismissing The Meadow, "a book locally written (and the prose style showed it)." It isn't hard to get annoyed at Galvin for these shenanigans, at least at the outset. But this book is so funny, and Snipes so delightfully mean, that it's equally hard not to be won over in the end. What ends up setting the book apart is its uncanny ability to be passionately political, to be absolutely serious, without ever lapsing in its absurd comedy or becoming mired in a self-referential quagmire. Its nominal thesis—that sustained land stewardship in the west should be considered in the context of leftist sixties radicalism—is eminently worth thinking about, as the development free-for-all in that region increasingly comes to resemble the work of a creeping capitalist totalitarianism. And as for the plot, Galvin has come up with a truly superb and surprising conclusion, which should satisfy even the staunchest paperback-western fundamentalist. It's hilarious and moving, and it does exactly what he wants it to. In short, Fencing the Sky is the great book of 1999 that nobody is reading. Read it. Someone goes on a journey. A stranger comes to town. Those are the formulas for the western, by now as broken in as your grandpa's boots. They are also the parallel narrative lines of the Odyssey, our proto-western, and could be applied to any of these books, which are all westerns after a fashion, regardless of where they're set. Things change and people get to quarrelling, and from out of the dust comes something new. Or so we hope. The trouble with oiling up an old genre is that, ultimately, it's a genre: its assumptions are not sustainable beyond the cultural moment in which it was created. The hard-boiled detective of the thirties comes off nowadays as a misogynist alkie. Classic science fiction embarrasses us with its freshly minted nuclear-age paranoia, now that the threat of annihilation has matured and we've grown jaded. And the cowboy no longer seems like the good guy, and the Indian no longer seems like the bad guy. The trick of writing a western, then, is to play off the assumptions of the form, to blur the difference between the good guys and bad, to let the characters develop in surprising ways. The western, as we have come to know it, no longer works. Of course, it never did, not as literature. Genre fiction is really propaganda, and always has been. Today's popular mysteries are where our new social order is incubating; the hard-boiled dicks of yore are in twelve-step programs and the brass knuckles are being brandished by women. Our thrillers are about lawyers and businessmen and the ways in which money is protected. Will the literary novelists of 2100, I wonder, be trying to clothe the skeletons of, say, the serial killer novel or the Harlequin romance with art, the way these writers have tried to rehabilitate villains and heroes in the vanishing wildernesses of America? Maybe. Though suddenly, even raising the question seems so. . . millennial, as will our literature to readers of the future. It's anyone's guess which, if any, of these writers those readers will have heard of, but my money's on Galvin. c2000 by J. Robert Lennon.