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Summary
Summary
A boy coming of age in a part of the country that's being left behind is at the heart of this dazzling novel--the first by an award-winning author of short stories that evoke the American West.
LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE * " August reads like early Hemingway, retooled for the present."--William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barbarian Days
Callan Wink has been compared to masters like Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane. His short stories have been published in The New Yorker and have won numerous accolades. Now his enormous talents are showcased in a debut novel that follows a boy growing up in the middle of the country through those difficult years between childhood and adulthood.
August is an average twelve-year-old. He likes dogs and fishing and doesn't mind early-morning chores on his family's Michigan dairy farm. But following his parents' messy divorce, his mother decides that she and August need to start over in a new town. There, he tries to be an average teen--playing football and doing homework--but when his role in a shocking act of violence throws him off course once more, he flees to a ranch in rural Montana, where he learns that even the smallest communities have dark secrets.
Covering August's adolescence, from age twelve to nineteen, this gorgeously written novel bears witness to the joys and traumas that irrevocably shape us all. Filled with unforgettable characters and stunning natural landscapes, this book is a moving and provocative look at growing up in the American heartland.
Author Notes
Callan Wink has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays appear widely, including in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope All-Story, Playboy, Men's Journal and The Best American Short Stories anthology. His first book, Dog Run Moon , was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Wink's accomplished debut novel (after the collection Dog Run Moon) explores the nuances of present-day agricultural life. August grows up on the family dairy farm in Michigan with his divorced parents, shuttling between the "old house" where his mother, Bonnie, lives, and the "new house" built by his father, Dar, with Bonnie's inheritance. After Dar shacks up with a woman just out of high school, Bonnie moves with August to Bozeman, Mont., where August attends high school and has his heart broken after sleeping with an older woman. He spends summers working for his father in Michigan, and after graduating, August defers college ("something people do to put off actually doing something") for a position on a Montana cattle ranch. Wink takes an assured, meandering approach to narrating August's life, as August creeps toward adulthood through a series of minor adventures, such as mending fences, drinking at the local watering hole, and learning how to dance. Wink brilliantly captures the stultifying effects of small-town life and the tension between free-spirited August and those stuck in the Montana "suckhole," concluding with a stunning, indelible image from August's rearview mirror. Like a current Jim Harrison, Wink makes irresistable drama out of an individual's search for identity in landscapes that are by turns romantic and limiting. (Mar)
Guardian Review
August, the eponymous hero of Callan Wink's debut novel, receives his fair share of unwanted advice. Mostly from other men, mostly about women. He does his level best to forget it all and strike out on his own. Like Wink's previous stories, August is set in the open expanse of the American midwest. It begins on the family dairy farm and follows characters from his short story "Breatharians" - teenage August, father Darwin, and mother Bonnie. His father wants him to carry on at the farm; his mother wants him to go to college. Young Augie is happy with his job killing stray cats, a dollar a tail. Violence erupts throughout. While at school August witnesses a near fatal stabbing; while at a party he witnesses a sexual assault. Trying to avoid a fight he runs his friend over with his car. Another friend dies in Iraq. Fed up, August heads west. He eventually ends up at the Virostok ranch in Montana. All around is sky and silence and August takes solace in his work. He explores the local area alone, hunts alone, fishes alone. Wink has a precise, clear prose style and these quieter moments are finely rendered: he has the hunter's attentive appreciation of his surroundings. The landscape is a character in itself - well-known, but changeable. In Montana August is taken under the wing of his boss and his neighbour. Both are happy to dispense advice, such as "One weenie can service many wombs," or "The sweetest meat is closest to the bone." August tends to keep his own counsel. When not bragging about women laid or fish landed the local men are monosyllabic: "I guess"; "probably true,"; "sounds about right". It's hamburgers while out and pork chops at home. No one ever eats the salad. There is a touch of black comedy and a shadow of the Southern Gothic and always the threat that restraint will erupt into violence or laughter boil over into rage. Wink skilfully weaves in a subtle sense of foreboding that never leaves. August ignores most advice but he does learn something about his country, his family and himself. In this tightly controlled yet highly unpredictable novel we discover what it is like to come of age in a part of America that is always changing, always the same.
Booklist Review
Wink, author of the short-story collection Dog Run Moon (2016), returns with his first novel, a beguiling coming-of-age tale about an introverted Michigan boy who is uprooted from his family's farm after his parents' divorce and finds himself in Montana living with his mother, an NPR-addicted librarian whose choice of a new home was dictated by seeing Brad Pitt in A River Runs through It ("The way he wears that creel across his chest is just . . . perfect, isn't it?"). Not so perfect is August's life in Montana, as a mostly silent outsider always on the edge of things, figuring that "everyone else was fine and it was just him that couldn't find a way to properly live." But, gradually, the world begins to come together for August, in part due to his work ethic, which serves him well as a hired hand on nearby ranches, and in part to his frequent phone calls with his father, with whom he talks mostly about the weather, though surprising degrees of intimacy lurk beneath the forecasts. A sensitive, extremely well wrought novel.
Excerpts
Excerpts
August's first, fully accessible memory was of the barn. Riding on his father's shoulders down the hill behind the house, he could see the building ahead of them, its peaked roof and the long, low addition off to the side, faded red with white trim. His father ducking under the door so he wouldn't hit his head, the dull murmur of the milk pump, the cows chewing in the stanchions. Maybe five or six, he was too old to be riding on his father's shoulders, and he didn't want to be there. As soon as he could, he squirmed down and climbed to the haymow. The rungs of the ladder were almost too far spaced, but his father was there at his back in case he slipped. In the haymow, dusty and dark and warm, his father broke up two bales to make a soft pile, and they had several wrestling matches during which August got repeatedly tossed into the loose hay, a situation he loved more than just about anything. After a time they descended the ladder, and August's father removed and sanitized the milkers while August went around patting each Holstein on the nose. When the milking was done, August helped his father dip the teats of several cows until August dropped the applicator and spilled the iodine solution and his father sat him in the milk room with a mason jar filled fresh from the refrigerator vat to keep him occupied while he finished the chores alone. The milk was full-fat, thick and heavy, cold enough to fog the glass. There was the smell of the cows and straw. The milk room was whitewashed, cobwebs in the old wooden crossbeams, the stainless vat spotless and gleaming. He held the mason jar with both hands, drinking, the milk running down his chin. Eventually his father came and scooped him up. The cows had been put out to pasture, and the barn was silent. He rode on his father's shoulders back to the house, tired and not protesting now. His mother was at the kitchen table, a dim gray haze of smoke above her head. She had books scattered around her, glasses on, taking notes. He crawled up on her lap and she wrinkled her nose, removing some papers from under one of his grubby hands. The sound of the TV being switched on came from the other room, his father opening a beer. She closed her books and put them into her backpack. "Looks like study hall is over," she said. "Thanks, Dad. Let's get you to the bath." August was twelve and there were cats in the barn. Litters begetting litters begetting litters--some thin and misshapen with the afflictions of blood too many times remixed. "Get rid of the damn things," August's father said. "The haymow smells like piss. Take a tire iron or a shovel or whatever tool suits you. You've been after me for school money? I'll give you a dollar a tail. You have your jackknife? You have it sharp? You take their tails and pound them to a board, and then after a few days we'll have a settling up. Small tails worth as much as large tails, it's all the same." The cats--calicos, tabbies, dirty white, gray, jet black, and tawny--sat among the hay bales scratching and yawning like indolent apes inhabiting the remains of a ruined temple. August had never actually killed a cat before but, like most farm boys, he had engaged in plenty of casual acts of torture. Cats, as a species, retained a feral edge, and as a result were not subject to the rules of husbandry that governed man's relation with horses or cows or dogs. August figured that somewhere along the line cats had struck a bargain--they knew they could expect to feel a man's boot if they came too close; in return, they kept their freedom and nothing much was expected of them. A dollar a tail. August thought of the severed appendages, pressed and dried, stacking up like currency in the teller drawer of some alien bank. Fifty dollars at least, maybe seventy-five, possibly even a hundred if he was able to track down the newborn litters. He went to the equipment shed to look for weapons. It was a massive structure, made of metal posts skinned with corrugated sheet metal, large enough to fit a full-sized diesel combine. August liked to go there when it rained. It was like being a small creature deep in the bowels of a percussion instrument. The fat drops of rain would hit the thin metal skin in an infinite drumroll, punctuated by the clash of lightning cymbals and the hollow booming of space. In the shed there was a long workbench covered in the tangled intestines of machinery: looping coils of compressor hoses, hydraulic arms leaking viscous fluid, batteries squat and heavy, baling twine like ligaments stitching the whole crazy mess together, tongue-and-ball trailer knobs, mason jars of rusting bolts and nuts and screws, a medieval-looking welder's mask, and, interspersed among the other wreckage like crumpled birds, soiled leather gloves in varying degrees of decomposition. August picked up a short length of rusted, heavy-linked logging chain and swung it a few times experimentally before discarding it. He put on a pair of too-large gloves and hefted a broadsword-sized mower blade, slicing slow patterns in the air, before discarding it, too. Then he uncovered a three-foot-long breaker bar wrench with a slim stainless-steel handle that swelled at the other end into a glistening and deadly crescent head. He brought the head down into his glove several times to hear the satisfying whack. He practiced a few death-dealing swing techniques--the sidearm golf follow-through; the overhead back-crushing ax chop; the short, quick line-drive baseball checked swing--the wrench head making ragged divots in the hard-packed dirt floor. He worked up a light sweat and then shouldered his weapon, put the pair of gloves in his back pocket, and went to see his mother. The old house was set back against a low, rock-plated hill. A year-round spring wept from the face of the rock, and the dampness of it filled the house with the smell of wet leaves and impending rain. The house was a single-level ranch that August's mother's grandparents had built with their own hands and lived in until they died. The old house looked up at the new house, the one August's father had finished the year after August was born. The new house was a tall Victorian with white shutters and a full wraparound porch. August's mother's parents had both died when he was young, and he had no memories of them. After their passing his father convinced his mother to sell the vacation home on Torch Lake. With the money he built the new house and bought eighty head of Holstein-Friesians. "He feels like it's his own," August's mother had said to him once, smoking in the kitchen of the new house. "His people didn't have much. Everything we got came from my side, you know. He would never admit it in a hundred years, but it bothers him." She coughed. "It's too big. That was my complaint from the get-go. It's hard to heat, too, exposed up on the hill like this; the wind gets in everywhere. My father or grandfather would have never done it like that. They built smart houses for their families, but that's the type of men they were." August tapped the door a few times with the wrench and went inside. The old house was built by folks interested in efficiency, not landscape, and its windows were few and small. The kitchen was dimly lit by a single shaft of light coming through the window over the sink. The room smelled like frying bacon, and the radio was on. Paul Harvey was extolling the virtues of a Select Comfort Sleep Number Bed. At my age there are few things I appreciate more than a night of restful sleep. Get this mattress. It was dreamed up by a team of scientists. "Augie, my fair son, how does the day find you?" His mother was at the kitchen table playing solitaire. A pan of thinly sliced potatoes fried with pieces of bacon and onion sat next to her ashtray. She smoked Swisher Sweet cigarillos, and a thin layer of smoke undulated above her head like a smooth gray flying carpet. He'd noticed that she seemed to tune in to Paul Harvey in order to make fun of him, while his father tended to listen to Paul Harvey just to listen. Excerpted from August: A Novel by Callan Wink All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.