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Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig; Published 2015; Read Jan 5, 2017

The world lost Ivan Doig in 2015 to multiple myoloma.  Fortunately he left behind 15 novels and several non-fiction books that will continue to provide us good literature to read and ponder.   In the Last Bus to Wisdom, Doig starts this story in Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a setting for his previous work, and in fact the location is the Double W ranch owned by Wendell Williamson, nephew of Wesley Williamson who we met in Doig’s Prairie Nocturne.  The story takes us on a trip east to Manitowoc, Wisconsin and then back to the west, all via Greyhound bus or its feeder lines.

We accompany Donal Cameron on these adventures that take place in the summer of 1951.  They are initiated when Donal’s grandmother, a cook at the Double W ranch, needs an operation for “female trouble”. (He’s been living with her since his parents died in a car accident. ) Gram sends him to her sister, Aunt Kate, who lives in Manitowac, WI with her husband Herman.  We enjoy Donal’s adventures on the Greyhound bus and his willingness and ability to spontaneously manufacture stories about himself, his family, and his travel plans.  His cross-country travel to Wisconsin takes about the first third of the book.

Once arrived at the last station of his trip, we meet Aunt Kate, who turns out not to be who Donal assumes she is (Kate Smith) and eventually turns out not to be who we, and perhaps Manitowac, assume she is.  His stay with Aunt Kate and “Herman the German” is an interesting strain for Aunt Kate and Donal while  Donal and Herman the German strike up a nice companionship. Eventually  Aunt Kate decides she can’t handle Donal anymore and she sends him back to Montana.  What she didn’t anticipate was that Herman would go with him, showing up in the seat next to Donal shortly before departure.

For the last third of the book we learn more about Herman and Kate as we follow their travels, but we mostly enjoy watching the relationship between Donal and Herman grow and the ways they manage through a number of interesting obstacles.  They’ve decided there isn’t a real need to take a straight line trip back to Two Medicine Country of Montana so they take a meandering course across the west.   Herman has been a major fan of Karl May, a German author specializing in western novels.  He has an interesting viewpoint of the American West and a desire t to see “the Karl May territory of Indian knights and pistoleer cowboys”.   Donal decides Herman must experience Crow Fair, here a fictionalized version of a real annual event and similar to an event Doig attended with his parents in the 1950’s.

Sprinkled throughout the book are the contributions Donal is getting in his autograph book from the various characters he meets during his travels.  Along with the signature, most contributors offer a rhyme or other catchy phrase that may include useful advice which sometimes comes via the interesting vernacular of the writer.  Donal even catches an entry from  Jack Kerouac, the encounter fictionalized of course, but with some of Kerouac’s actual, acknowledged, words.  Doig also uses a quote from Keroac to open the book.

Doig eventually ties together some plot lines and finds a way to get his pair of characters out of the very hot water they find themselves as a series of mishaps toss them into stormy seas of the Great Plains.  Donal must make a very significant decision at the end and tells us “I heard my decision the same instant the two of them did.”

Doig took the initial plot line from his own history—-he was sent to live with an aunt when his ranch-hand father was recovering from surgery and his ranch-cook

grandmother was going to the hospital to address “female problems”.  But he indicates that his aunt and uncle were nothing like the characters he invents for us and Doig’s bus ride was completely unmemorable.  He demonstrates that while his stories may be set in the west, he’s not a “western writer”.  He gives us unforgettable characters and stories of how they deal with trying times and issues and does it with language we wish he could continue writing.

The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin

Published 2016

Read Jan 7, 2016

Sharon Guskin became acquainted with the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson when she was passed a copy of Old Souls by Tom Shroder, a Washinton Post reporter.  Stevenson was a professor at the University of Virginia Medical School for over fifty years. He research considered reincarnation, in particular the possibility that emotions, memories, and physical injuries in the form of birth marks can be transferred from one life to another. Guskin’s first novel uses this concept to explore a number of themes including the powerful bond between mother and child, the devotion of a mother to her child, the impact of the death of a loved one, the sacrifices one is willing to make to pursue research not embraced by colleagues, and the devastation of the loss of brain function from dementia type diseases.

We meet Janie, a single mom, and Noah, her lively four year-old and the product of a one night stand.  Noah has always been a handful for Janie, but has becoming increasingly difficult to handle, refusing to bathe, experiencing terrifying dreams, and asking when he can go home to his mother.  The situation reaches crisis mode when his daycare essentially kicks him out after he tells other student about playing with a gun–a .54-caliper Renegade rifle.  Janie tries a number of doctors and psychiatrists and nearly relents to meditating him to treat a diagnosis of schizophrenia but instead turns to a psychiatrist she finds on the internet that has interests in children who recall details from previous lives.

We meet Dr. Jerome Anderson, a professor of psychiatry, who has chosen a career limiting research pursuit of reincarnation as demonstrated by children who recall past lives.  He’s still in deep mourning for his wife who he lost to cancer the previous year when he gets his own tragic diagnosis–primary progressive aphasia–which will slowly rob him of his language cognition leaving him unable to communicate verbally or through writing.  Funding for his research institute has been cut recently and he’s closed his office. He’s trying to get a book published on his research that is intended for the general public but his editor would like to see another American case.

Thus the needs of Janie and Anderson bring them together to consider and solve the mystery of Noah.

The story is told through three voices—Janie’s, Anderson’s, and Denise, a mother whose son Tommy went missing a number of years ago.  In between the chapter Guskin provides excerpts from Jim B. Tucker’s book  Life Before Life.   In the acknowledgements we learn that Tucker is a real person and the book is a real book.  He was an associate of Dr. Ian Stevenson at is still at the University of Virginia Medical School.

On the surface this is a psychological mystery.  It does keep you turning the pages.  In addition, however, as you read you begin to pause and consider a not only the themes noted above but as well as the concepts of mortality, how we spend our lives, and what happens before and after we are alive.

Plainsong,  published 1999; Eventide, published 2004; Benediction, published 2013 by Kent Haruf

Kent Haruf had published novels twice before (The Tie That Binds in 1984 and Where You Once Belonged in 1990).  He even won the Whiting Award in 1986 for The Tie That Binds.  (1)  But it was Plainsong, published in 1999 when he was 56, that was his “break out” work, reaching best seller status, widespread acclaim from reviewers and readers, and a National Book Award nomination.  The successes of this book enabled him to write full time.   To do so, he and his second wife, Cathy, moved to a Colorado community about 60 miles from where they met in high school.  She became a hospice volunteer during this period.   Eventide eventually followed in 2004 and finally Benediction in 2013.

All five of Haruf’s books are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, a few hours’ drive from Denver.  Apparently others as well as I see his descriptions of the landscape, the town, and the details of the toil of farming and ranching as almost as an additional character to the novels.  This aspect of the novels, as well as his strong storytelling and sparse yet sufficient character development, is a strong draw for us to seek out his other writings.

Each of these books tells the intertwining stories of a set of characters.   However, the set of characters changes in each book although the McPheron brothers are either central characters (Plainsong and Eventide) or are mentioned (Benediction).

Plainsong has several sets of characters:  Tom Guthrie, a principled high school teacher whose wife withdraws from the family; his sons Ike and Bobby; Victoria Roubideaux, a pregnant high school girl thrown out of her house by her mother; Harold and Raymond McPherons, bachelor brother famers who take in Victoria at the urging of Maggie Smith, a high school teacher who eventually becomes romantically involved with Tom Guthrie.

Eventide feels somewhat like a sequel to Plainsong in that we do follow the story of the McPheron brothers and Victoria as they experience the pain and joy of a young person leaving for the next phase of their life.  The other character sets are new:  a social worker and the dysfunctional family she’s monitoring; a lonely young boy who takes care of his grandfather and provides some support to a neighbor, a young mother who has been abandoned by her husband. Continue reading “Observations on Kent Haruf’s Trilogy (?)”

Where You Once Belonged by Kent Haruf

Published 1990

In his second novel, Where You Once Belonged, Kent Haruf continues an approach from his first novel, A Tie That Binds.  Specifically we start our reading with a third party narrator who turns the story over to a first-person narrator, Pat Arbuckle,  who tells us the story of the focal character, in this case, Jack Burdett, the best football player Holt, Colorado had ever seen,  and how the narrator’s story intertwines with that of the focal character with increasing intimacy.

In The Tie That Binds, a violent accident is the primary fault line that amplifies a difficult family situation and the abusive nature of a primary character and defines the life course for the focal character.  In Where You Once Belonged, the arrogance, thoughtlessness, and greed of a primary character, rather than a terrible, perhaps preventable, but nonetheless terrific accident, results in tragic outcomes for multiple characters that cared for and or deeply trusted him.   Thus this book takes us towards some themes that Haruf starts in The Tie That Binds and extends in the Plainsong “Triology”—-1) human beings are capable of causing great harm to others and that capability is regularly exhibited, not one that only occasionally arises; 2) human beings can persevere and even thrive in the face of human caused obstacles and can do so with grace, courage, and humility.

I synthesize from several reviews that this book was written before Haruf took up the “write blind” approach used in Plainsong and later books—-typing the first draft on a manual typewriter while wearing a wool cap over his eyes.  Unlike books written blind, Haruf does use standard punctuation in this book, but the engaging sentences were already apparent and thus not fully relliant on punctuation style.

“It [Wanda Jo’s reaction to hearing her long-time boyfriend, Jack Burdett, had married someone else] began immediately.  For the rest of that morning she sat in the telephone office rest room, staring at the tiled floor, wiping her nose on cheap toilet paper, crying quietly, her recently curled strawberry blonde hair fallen forward about her abashed and stricken face and her slim white neck bowed and exposed as if she were waiting for some final blow of some Holt County inquisitor’s ax.  All of that-that dreadful individual remorse and despair and submission-while the fan overhead went on making its maddening little noise and while the other women out in the front office continued to talk about her and to send a representative from among themselves every fifteen minutes or so to check on her.  She stayed in the rest room all that morning.  Then at noon one of the women drove her home.”

The ending is difficult–no happy endings here.   Jack Burdett created a wound in the town that hadn’t healed completely, only scabbed over.  He returned to pick that scab off and ended up ripping it off with ferocity.  Despite this, life will continue for the characters.  All will move forward somehow and at least some with remnants of positive thoughts.  The narrator, Pat Arbuckle, leaves us with  “I want to believe she is all right too…..I want to believe that much and I hope for more.”