Monday, December 16, 2019

The contemporary West: It's not John Wayne country

We are in eastern Montana: "As the neighbor girl's SUV disappeared down the road, Wendell watched the tire-kicked dust bloom and sift through shades of gold, ochre, and high in the evening sky a pearling blue. Harvest light, late-August light—thin, slanted, granular. At his back the mountains already bruised and dark."

A social worker has dropped seven-year-old Rowdy Burns on twenty-one-year-old Wendell, the boy's only relative. Wendell is living in a trailer on what's left of the family's ranch land (the house remains, but it's unlivable), an orphan after his mother died a year earlier. Rowdy is "developmentally delayed," "variously involved," and, "hadn't said so much as a word since they'd found him" locked alone in an apartment on the south side of Billings for more than a week. His mother is Wendell's cousin on her way into prison for a drug bust.

Joe Wilkin's first novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, is told from three points of view: Wendell's; Gillian's, a forty-nine assistant school principal, single mother, whose ranger husband had been murdered ten years earlier; and Verl's, who writes a writing a fragmentary diary/letter to his son as he evades federal marshals while he hides out in the Bull Mountains.

This is Cliven Bundy country rather than John Wayne's, where this land is my land; it's not your land; and it's sure as heck not the government's land, which can go stuff itself. A land where a pickup truck will proudly wear a "Global Warming: Another Liberal Tax Scam" bumper sticker. This is Bureau of Land Management land "that had once belonged to the Crow, to the grizzly bears and buffalo. A land homesteaded less than a hundred years ago and abandoned not long after, a wilderness now of collapsed coal mines and yawing shacks, ghost towns not even old-timers could recall the names of, where the dry arteries of forsaken train lines bled into cactus and grass. A land leased and grazed and logged every so often but in large part empty, home to elk and antelope and mule deer, bobcat and cougar and coyote, and, for the past dozen years, a seldom-seen pack of wolves."

This is a novel rich in description, character, and incident. We learn how to prepare traps and set them. We see Gillian doing her best to bring education (civilization?) to her public school, one with so few students that to lose one is to threaten its existence. Both Wendell, as his guardian, and Gillian, as his teacher, want the best for Rowdy. But what is the best? What is the best for the land? To cut all the BLM fence wire and let cattle roam where they will? To exterminate the wolves before they can kill any lambs?

Wilkins was born and raised north of the Bull Mountains, out on the Big Dry of eastern Montana. His The Mountain and the Fathers, "captures the lives of boys and men in that desolate country, a place that shapes the people who live there and rarely lets them go." He is also the author of three poetry collections, most recently When We Were Birds, winner of the 2017 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Orion, TriQuarterly, Ecotone, The Sun, and High Country News.

According to his website, Wilkins spent two years teaching ninth grade pre-algebra in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America after graduating from Gonzaga University with a degree in computer engineering, an experience on which he draws in Fall Back Down When I Die. He then went on to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho. He now lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of western Oregon, where he directs the creative program at Linfield College.

With his background as a teacher, memoirist, and poet, Wilkins has written an exceptional first novel. It deserves to be read by anyone who is interested in the modern West, outstanding writing, and other lives.

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