Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig

I want to pay tribute to one of the really memorable writers of the last century and the first part of this one. Ivan Doig was born in 1939 and died in 2015. His last novel Last Bus to Wisdom, was published in the year he died. While I want to pay tribute to his entire oeuvre, I will focus in on the final work.

Doig said of himself “I come from the Lariat proletariat, the working-class point of view.” And certainly his novels that dealt with the massive Anaconda copper mine in Montana made it clear that his sympathies lie with the miners, the sheep herders, the homesteaders and not with huge agri-businesses and ranches that came to dominate the western frontier.

I have to admit I came to Doig rather slowly. I found his early novels interesting as stories of the immigrant settlers of Montana, but spoiled reader that I am, I at first saw his writing as a little too simplistic, even rustic. I was used to marvelous women word-weavers like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Indeed, I felt I had been short-changed in my university literature courses which focused almost entirely on male writers, and when I discovered I had been assigned the long and rather dull Theodore Drieser novels when I might have been reading the the far superior Wharton, I pretty much gave up reading male novelists and concentrated instead on filling the huge gap in my reading, namely, that of women writers.

Still, Doig represented an important inroad for me back to male writers of the late 20^th and early 21^st century. Judging from his writing, I would say Doig is a good man, even a sweet one, and while I would not characterize him as a political novelist, he certainly wrote of and for common people. I have come to see almost all of his work as quite closely autobiographical. He was one of those rare writers who had best sellers in both fiction and nonfiction.  His superb portrayal of Montana, the nonfiction This House of Sky, is overtly autobiographical, but almost all of his novels have a young male narrator, and a manner of speech, even a type of humor that run like a vein through his works.

In his final novel, the boy narrator, Donal, is orphaned at an early age and raised by his grandmother who is a cook at various restaurants or for cattle and sheep ranches. Although she is a skillful and in-demand cook who could make a lot more money working in restaurants, she takes on the job of cook for the Double W ranch in order to have Donal at her side rather than with sitters. Although I won’t reveal too much of the story, I will reveal that his much-loved grandmother gets cancer and needs an operation and then a place to convalesce. While some nuns in their small Montana town agree to care for her after her operation, Donal has to be found a home until  she recuperates enough to go back to work and reclaim Donal.

He is put on a Greyhound bus which he calls the dog bus and sent clear across country to Wisconsin to live with his only other relative, his Aunt Kitty and her husband Dutch. About the first third of the novel is devoted to his cross-country bus-ride and the many people he meets and gets to sign his autograph book, which he hopes will someday win the Guiness Book of Records for most autographs. Donal is a bit like Lily Tomilin’s character, Edith Ann who is accused of making up stories. When she objects saying that grown ups mean by making up stories, lying, and she doesn’t lie, she then continues, “but you can make up the truth if you know how.” Donal is certainly in this class of storytellers, and his heartwarming and wise story is so full of down-to-earth humor and naïve goodness; he (and Doig) clearly know how to make up the truth.

Unfortunately, his Aunt Kate is a self-absorbed and selfish woman who has no real feelings for her grand-nephew and no idea of how to care for a young boy. Her only use for him is to teach him how to play canasta in order to fill in for one of a foursome who has droped out. Between her screaming at her husband, Herman (aka Dutch), and riding herd on poor Donal, he is facing a long and very boring summer. Turns out Herman (who is German rather than Dutch) is obsessively interested in stories of the wild west, and has spent a great deal of time reading a German author who writes of the shoot-um up west.

It does not take Aunt Kate long to repent of her impulsive offer to care for Donal, and long before the summer is over, she simply sends him back to Montana, though she knows that her sister is no condition to care for him, nor is there a place for him to stay. What could have been a sad and worrisome ride home on the big dog bus becomes a wonderful, rollicking trip when Uncle Herman decides to make his escape from his wife, whom he calls “the Kate,” by accompanying Donal. They head first for a big Indian carnival so Herman can finally see some Indians for himself.

Doig writes about what he knows, and that means about sheep and cattle and the workers who tend them. There is a quiet wisdom that bubbles up from the characters and events in his stories that would be difficult to put in capsule form. Suffice it to say that the more I read him, the wiser he seems, and I also have come to realize his rather plain style of writing serves very well for the stories he wanted to tell. While there is much heartbreak and hardship in all his works, there are also shining examples of loyalty and solidarity. 

Doig resisted the title western writer, and I can understand why. Yes, he writes of the west, of the people, but what he reveals is much wider than simply stories of the west. I am so glad that I allowed him to guide me back into at least a somewhat more balanced set of writers in terms of gender. Like Alice Munro and Elizabeth Strout, Doig reveals the extraordinary in ordinary people and so-called ordinary lives.

White Fur by Jardine Libaire

I started a novel a few weeks ago I was sure I would put down in a few pages: poor girl meets rich college boy and romance flares. The novel in question is White Fur, and I knew after not many pages I would be reading it clear through. The writing is gritty and glamorous, much like its heroine, Elise.

The boy in question, Jamey, is not only very rich, he is also handsome to the point of being beautiful. Jamey’s roommate’s girlfriend reacts to him as most women do. 

She’s scared, in a titillating sense, which is how most girls feel near Jamey. He’s not charming—it’s something weirder, more potent, dangerous. He’s so convincingly disconnected from his beauty that people look away, not wanting to be the one who tips him off with their gawking.

Elise is also arresting but not in a cute, well-dressed way. Instead wrapped in her white fur coat (thrift shop, and probably rabbit fur), she appears disdainful of the male attention directed her way.

Aficionados of sex see her in a crowd. Some guys stumble upon her and crudely realize their luck halfway into it. Some have no idea, and turn her out of bed as if they did what they’d come to do, not understanding they hadn’t even started. Those dudes smoked and hummed while they dressed and she felt sorrier for them than she felt for herself.  

Elise never separates things into day and night, rarely thinks about being a boy or girl, or alive or dead. Without division, there’s less work to do. She floats, free in a cheap and magic 

way.

What Jamey goes for in Elise is her sense of freedom and her expansive knowledge of sex. Although he has been a very good student in the past, once he meets Elise his interest in school evaporates. His ivy league education he equates with his parents and their wealth, and all of it he feels as restriction. Still, when he first takes up with Elise he has no intention of inviting her into his family life, or even into his circle of friends. At first he thinks it’s just the sex.

Although the novel seems to borrow from earlier impossible romances: Romeo and Juliet,  or the star-crossed couple in Westside Story, Libiare brings in the real grit of city life in White Fur. Jamey’s attempts to escape from the pull of family by first giving up school, and then in a more desperate attempt by giving up his trust fund. Still, his family will not let him go, and he finally finds himself locked up in a psychiatric unit and given drugs that threaten to in fact throw him over the edge. 

As a reader of this novel, I was certain on some level that the romance would end, the family and the power of money would win out. And certainly the author is well aware of how power and money go together; she is also aware of the shallowness of the lives of trust-fund kids, and she displays it with great clarity in this rather long love-story.

In one scene when Elise leaves Jamey, and orphan that she is, he thinks he has no way of finding her, 

He think this whole thing looks like a prank. 

It always struck him as suspicious—how she showed up, the girl next door, and kept after him until he fell in love, this choosing between her and his family—it’s too biblical, too tragic, too concise a conundrum for a life as amoral as his. 

He’s never had to be moral. He falls into one of those crevices: a certain kid in a certain society in a certain generation where no decisions remain because his ancestors have finished every single thing within reach…he feels a revelation like adrenalin. If everything is already done, maybe I’m here to undo things.

Alas, things are not as easy to undo as he had thought, and the reach of his family is even wider than he had believed. 

But the family is not aware of the strength of Elise, of her cool contempt for their wealth. Even when the family essentially has him committed, since who, after all, gives up a trust fund and an easy life for a trashy girl in a rabbit coat, unless they are crazy? Elise finds a way into the private clinic and befriends some staff. In one of the most captivating scenes in the novel, she simply walks him out of his prison, and decides she will be able to bring him down from the drug dependency the clinic experience has brought on, and shelter him until they can escape for good.

An unlikely romance for sure, and it may test the credulity of some readers, but I found this to be a powerful and beautifully written book, and I could not help but hold out hope for the lovers. I’m not about to tell you how the story ends, but I hope you will pick up the novel and find out; you will be glad you did.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

I almost never read fantasy literature, and am even less likely to review it. However, I was so charmed by Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, that besides buying several copies to send to nieces and nephews, I find I want to talk to you readers about the book this morning. I had never heard of the book, nor the Russian fairytale from which it is spun, but I’m finding many of my reader friends have and have been as struck with it as I.  Part One of the book is headed by a quote from Arthur Ransome’s Little Daughter of the Snow:

“Wife, let us go into the yard behind and make a little snow girl; and perhaps she will come alive, and be a little daughter to us.”

“Husband,” says the old woman, “there’s no knowing what may be. Let us go into the yard and make a little snow girl.”

Ivey is from Alaska, and this is her debut novel. A story of a couple in their fifties who decide to move to Alaska and to farm there. It is the wife, Mabel, who lobbies strongest for the reclusion, but both seem attracted to a life distanced from others. Her husband and husband’s family own a farm in the eastern United States, so he knows farming. Her parents are educators, and are flabbergasted by their daughter’s moving into a remote unknown. This is 1920, and the growing season in Alaska is very short, tough place to homestead.

What the reader comes to discover is that Mabel is childless and her husband Jack’s family is teeming with children. “There had been the one. A tiny thing, born still and silent. Ten years past, but even now she felt herself returning to the birth…” 

Mabel had known there would be silence. That was the point after all. No infants cooing or wailing. No neighbor children playfully hollering down the lane. No pad of small feet on wooden stairs worn smooth by generations, or clackety-clack of toys along the kitchen floor. All those sounds of her failure and regret would be left behind, and in their place there would be silence.

The silence and loneliness in fact lead to Mabel’s being suicidal. She even ventures onto ice that covers a deep hole in the river, daring it to break and let her float away like the maple leaf she sees floating below the surface of the ice. The growing distance between her and Jack is   highlighted when she tries to tell him that she had ventured onto too-thin ice, and he simply doesn’t hear her. Instead, on a winter snow day (after a long and dry summer and fall), there is a perfect snow–covering everything with a mantel of light and purity. Jack finds the snow is packable,  and in a moment of levity, suggests that they make a snowman. ‘“A girl. Let’s make it a little girl,” she said. “All right.”’Jack, who has some artistic talent, uses his pocketknife to craft a nose, and lips for their snow-girl—they even use cranberry juice to color the lips. Mabel finds a red scarf and mittens.

In the sunny morning there is only the base snow left, the scarf and mittens are gone. But there are fox tracks and what appear to be a child’s barefoot tracks.  Jack has already spotted a fox very close to the farm on several occasions, and fears for their chickens. Soon, both Mabel and Jack begin to see glimpses of a young girl in the woods, just a flash of red and blue, gone as quickly as it appeared. And the magical story begins. There is a girl running through the woods, and the fox is hers, raised from newborn pup by her. The magic of the story, and the beauty of the descriptions of the Alaskan landscape continue throughout this lovely tale, and easily allow the suspension of disbelief the tale requires. 

At first, when each of the couple acknowledges to the other that they are seeing a girl in the woods, they suppose it must be a girl from a neighboring farm, a girl actually lost in the woods in winter. And that they must save her. But there are few families in the area, and no children missing, and soon enough they discover that the snow-girl is quite able to fend for herself (and her fox) in the frozen woods.  Explanations are hatched or presented to explain how she can live in such conditions, and how she came to be there. Eventually she comes to them, sits with them, eats with them, but only in the winter. When springs comes, she disappears back into the woods and to higher elevations. 

I fear I’m already telling too much of the story, and Ivey tells it so well that you need to read it in her words. And read it to your children in her words. I can visualize so clearly the girl, Faina, hunting with her red fox at her side. I understand on such a deep level the couple’s wanting to keep her to them, and her understanding of why she must remain Faina of the woods. 

Despite Mabel’s rejection of almost any form of attention or sympathy, she is more-or-less forced into accepting a neighbor woman as a friend. The friendship and conversations between the two add substance to the novel. 

While this is a fairytale, it is one with many twists, twists of mystery, twists of romance. As one commentator suggests, it never goes where you expect it to go. And it is a lovely tale of Mabel’s existential awakening, that we are being-with (one of the universal and necessary conditions of what it is to be human). {Heidegger called these existentialia}

I read this a couple of weeks ago, and would not have planned to review, but it is still so much with me, so charming (and informing), so full of delight. If I had children, I would read this to them eagerly, though it is long story. A story for camping, for imagining and wondering.