Ivan Doig died eight years ago and left a body of work about
the West--more in the vein of Mark Twain than, say, Cormac McCarthy. This has got to be the most wholesome,
G-rated book I have read in a long time and is a nice departure from the bleak
stuff I’ve been reading lately. It’s
basically a coming-of-age story that takes place in the early 1900s in rural
Montana. The Milliron family consists of
a widower father and his three young sons—Paul, Damon, and Toby. No one in the
family has culinary skills, but, nonetheless, the father, Oliver, is intrigued
by a newspaper ad whose headline reads, “Can’t Cook But Doesn’t Bite.” He decides to hire the woman, Rose, who
arrives some weeks later by train, along with her uninvited brother,
Morrie. There’s obviously something
fishy about this pair, but Rose turns out to be a very capable housekeeper, although
she wasn’t joking about the “can’t cook” statement. The erudite Morrie makes himself useful by
chopping wood and the like until he is offered the job of teacher at the
one-room school attended by the Milliron boys.
The schoolhouse is, in fact, the setting for most of the adventures in
this novel, and Morrie has a knack for making sure the students learn more than
just the 3 R’s. Paul, the oldest son in
the Milliron family, is the first person narrator, who has to grapple with some
adult-sized dilemmas, and his after-school tutelage in Latin contrasts sharply
with his feisty encounters with the school bully, whom he comes to pity rather
than fear. Rose obviously doesn’t bite
and this novel lacks bite as well, but it definitely does not cruise along
uneventfully, either. The
once-every-75-year appearance of Halley’s comet is an occurrence that captures
the attention of the earthbound inhabitants of this novel, which doesn’t reach
celestial heights but certainly provides a welcome breath of fresh Montana air.
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