In his first novel, Montana memoirist William
Kittredge serves up a simmering potboiler, a deliberately
old-fashioned stew rich with The-Summer-I-Became-a-Man mythology
and a poor boy/rich girl romance.
The mother of
The Willow Field’s protagonist, Rossie
Benasco, runs a sort of halfway house in Reno for divorcées:
“By the time his voice changed, Rossie had seen more than one woman
weep because a cowboy hadn’t come around to say goodbye.”
Soon the 15-year-old Rossie hits the trail himself,
herding horses from California to Calgary during the Depression-era
1930s. The novel follows this half-Basque Nevada native,
inarticulate and untutored, through sundry rites of passage —
from bedroom conquests, to that first underage sip of a double
martini, to the gunning down of a “velvet-horned” buck.
Readers with delicate sensibilities should be forewarned that
nearly every character on these hard sod prairies has a foul mouth;
even Kittredge’s womenfolk do not blush to bandy terms that
are sexually graphic and scatologically precise.
Much of
the story takes place in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains,
where Rossie marries Eliza Stevenson, the daughter of two
ex-Chicagoans who have fled academe for life on a ranch. The
novel’s sharpest exchanges center on Eliza’s wealthy
parents, Bernard and Lemma. Good neurotic energy pulses not far
below the surface of their polite façades. Bernard nourishes
himself by claiming a kinship to Robert Louis Stevenson, and he
introduces Rossie to Krazy Kat cartoons and hot jazz. Kittredge
uses the music of the day to entrancing effect: The Willow Field is
at its most pleasing when everyone ceases swearing and simply
dances the night away to Bix Beiderbecke or Earl Hines.
The Willow Field
William
Kittredge
342 pages, hardcover: $24.95.
Knopf,
2006
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Dancing to Biederbecke in Montana.
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