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Summary
Summary
"From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them... " So begins David Hayden's story of what happened in Montana in 1948. The events of that cataclysmic summer permanently alter twelve-year-old David's understanding of his family: his father, a small-town sheriff; his remarkably strong mother; David's uncle Frank, a war hero and respected doctor; and the Haydens' Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, whose revelations turn the family's life upside down as she relates how Frank has been molesting his female Indian patients. As their story unravels around David, he learns that truth is not what one believes it to be, that power is abused, and that sometimes one has to choose between family loyalty and justice.
Author Notes
Born in Rugby, North Dakota, & raised in Bismark, Larry Watson received his B.A., & M.A. in English from the University of North Dakota & his Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Utah. Watson is the author of the novel "In a Dark Time" & a book of poetry, "Leaving Dakota". He taught English at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point & lives in Plover, Wisconsin.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Watson's novel about a middle-class Montana family torn apart by scandal during the summer of 1948 was awarded the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Watson (In a Dark Time, 1980), winner of the 1993 Milkweed National Fiction Prize, offers a lean, gaunt narrative rich with implication about a 12-year-old boy who witnesses the anguish of his sheriff father, who is forced to arrest his own brother for rape. David Hayden, now a history teacher, narrates the events of over 40 years ago, when his father, trained as a lawyer, was in his second term as sheriff of Bentrock, a small community of 2,000 close to the Canadian border. David's grandfather was also once a sheriff in a place where the land is harsh, the wind strong, and the sky endless. Meanwhile, David's Uncle Frank, a war hero, is a doctor, and the plot unfolds when Marie Little Soldier, the Haydens' housekeeper, falls sick. She screams when Uncle Frank treats her--then reveals that Frank has a reputation as a rapist of Indian women. David's father investigates and wrests from Frank a promise that he won't rape any more Indians. But then Marie dies unexpectedly, and David reveals information that leads his father to suspect that Frank had something to do with the death. He arrests Frank, but locks him in his own basement instead of in jail. The rest of Watson's story treats the consequences of that arrest: grandfather Hayden threatens his sheriff son, excusing the war hero uncle's sexual rapacity as normal instinct (``You know Frank's always been partial to red meat''); and Frank, after busting all the jelly and preserve jars in the basement where he's imprisoned, kills himself, whereupon the sheriff packs up his wife and son and moves away. A literary page-turner, morally complex and satisfying in its careful accumulation of detail and in its use of landscape to reveal character.
Booklist Review
The relationship of landscape to personality is a familiar theme, especially in western literature, but it may never have been explored with as much sensitivity and as fine an eye for detail as Watson manages in this stunning coming-of-age novel, the winner of the 1993 Milkweed National Fiction Prize.The "harshness of the land and the flattening effect of the wind" made life hard in Mercer County, Montana, in 1948, "so much so that nothing was left over for raising hell or making trouble." Well, maybe a little something, as the shocking events of David Watson's twelfth summer reveal: his father, the sheriff of Bentrock, Montana, forced to accuse David's Uncle Frank, a war hero and physician, of molesting numerous Indian women and murdering one of them, David's family's housekeeper; Frank's subsequent jailing, not in the city jail but in David's basement; and, finally, Frank's suicide, his body found by David's father: "Then my father's tears broke loose, one more briny fluid to mingle on the basement floor." The action unfolds circuitously, as David remembers how he pieced together what was happening, mostly through eavesdropping (an activity at which every only child excels). Yes, the novel is a kind of thriller and certainly a page turner, but, moreover, it is a quiet, almost meditative reflection on the hopelessly complex issue of doing the right thing--and on the courage it takes to face one's demons: "The shock of hearing this about Uncle Frank was doubled because my mother was saying these words. Rape. Breasts. Penis. These were words I never heard my mother use--never . . ." The unspoken life of any small town, especially a small, hardscrabble western town, contains a motherlode of raw emotion, morally ambiguous and potentially devastating. Watson mines that vein with both unflinching honesty and complete respect, both for the dignity of the people and the implacability of the landscape. Inevitably, this spare, poetic novel will be compared with Norman Maclean's A River Runs through It; the comparison is apt on some levels--both explore the effect of cataclysmic events on naturally reticent people--but Watson deserves his own space under Montana's Big Sky. ~--Bill Ott
Library Journal Review
A young Sioux woman tossing with fever on a cot; a father begging his wife for help; a mother standing uncertainly in her kitchen with a 12-gauge shotgun: from these fragments of memory, evoked by the narrator as the novel opens, Watson builds a simple but powerful tale. It is Montana in 1948, and young David Hayden's father, Wesley, is sheriff of their small town--a position he inherited from his domineering father. Wesley is overshadowed by his older brother, Frank, a war hero who is now the town doctor. When Marie, the Sioux woman who works for the Haydens, fall ill, she adamantly resists being examined by Frank. Some probing reveals that Frank has been molesting the Indian women in his care. Wesley's dilemma--should he turn in his own brother?--is intensified when Marie is found dead and David confesses that he saw his uncle near the house before she died. The moral issues, and the consequences of following one's conscience, are made painfully evident here. Watson is to be congratulated for the honesty of his writing and the purity of his prose. Highly recommended.-- Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
