Book Review: The Willow Field

My goal for a very long time has been to review every book I read on this blog. But I have not even come close. Regardless, I still try to add one here or there, and today I happen to have some strange desire to do so with William Kittredge's The Willow Field.

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First, a few facts that you may or may not know. I grew up reading a lot of Western books, especially Louis Lamour paperbacks. Also, as an English Lit major at Western Washington University my culminating class and thesis was on literature of the American West. I focused specifically on A.B. Guthrie Jr's The Big Sky. Since that time I have spent a lot of time with my nose in books based in the American West, especially when written by folks like Wallace Stegner, David James Duncan, Norman Maclean, Sherman Alexie, Jim Welch, or even Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver or Douglas Coupland. Although we don't seem to have the same recognition as Southern Gothic, the writers of the West have made a name for themselves and I include my name on the list of their followers.

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The Willow Field, though Kittredge's first novel, fits right into the genre of modern Western literature. It deals openly and honestly with the violence, contradictions, and evolution of life in the West. Rossie, the story's protagonist, begins the book as a hard-headed young man out to make a living riding horses and being a good ol' fashioned cowboy. In other words, the story begins and the reader quickly falls into a panic, thinking this is going to be a cliched Western with quick-draw cowboys, hard drinking, tough talking, and big brawls. But Kittredge honors the American West. Rossie's life mirrors the times and locations in which he lives. He starts wanting to be a classic, cliched cowboy, but he matures and changes with experience and with the help of varied relationships. He becomes the classic Western sage; practical, independent, stubborn, opinionated, and displaying a strange mixture of book-knowledge and everyday wisdom. As his life progresses, he changes and grows. Some of the people around him do the same and others do not. Which is what I think this book is about: change and how to adapt and respond to it in the West. The kind of changes I am talking about have to do with outsiders coming in, the West's correspondence with the larger world, land use versus exploitation and conservation, public lands, private lands, big and small governments, race, etc. Kittredge presents these issues and more with only one or two soap box messages (having to do especially with mines, which if you've never read about mining in Montana, you should know that somebody definitely needs to get on a gigantic soap box to talk about it).

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Here's my issue, and it really has little to do with Kittredge or The Willow Field, at least directly. Why does Western Literature always seem to be based in Montana and Wyoming? I'm a bit confused as to how places like Western Washington and Western Oregon fit into this genre, because supposedly our literature fits into this category as well. So often I read books like this and I feel forgotten, poorly represented. I wonder if we should have our own genre, maybe call it Far-Western Literature or something of that sort. Because honestly, a story like Snow Falling on Cedars or Sometimes a Great Notion speaks about this region in a much better fashion, yet seems to have little to do with books like The Willow Field. Just a thought.

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Peace,

Matt