"I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation." (Exodus 20:5)"The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son." (Ezekiel 18:20)Does your father’s character predetermine your own? Can you escape the destiny that your family history has seemingly preordained? This story chronicles the struggle for a boy’s soul. From the distance of time, a 52-year-old man remembers the boy he was at 12. His memory of 1948 consists of a series of images: a Sioux woman lying desperately ill at his house; his father begging his mother for help; and his mother racking a shell into the chamber of a shotgun. Along with the "sound of breaking glass" and "the smell of rotting vegetables," there is a tone of menace from the opening that kept me, with lead in my stomach, burning through its 160 pages over the course of two sittings. I needed to know. What’s mom doing with that shotgun? Why is dad begging mom? What does the Sioux woman have to do with any of this? While giving us some answers to these questions, David Hayden will reconstruct “the trail that led him out of his childhood.”The writing style is understated and unaffected in a way that reflects the sparse landscape in which this story is set. The first-person narrator, David Hayden, lives in Mercer County, Montana, in 1948. Mercer County lies hidden away up in the far north-eastern corner of Montana, and the county is schizophrenically divided between the flat plains of its west and the gully-rivened ravines of its east. Mercer County is a limitless sea of grass, all of it treeless and wind-lashed. “If the land had its way, nothing would grow taller than sagebrush and buffalo grass.” The weather scorches this land in summer and freezes it in winter, and this very harshness has a way of annealing its people. Wes Hayden, David’s father, is a disappointment to his wife, his father, his son, and himself. Wes is a sheriff in the post-war world. Like Jem in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” David is dismissive of his father whose job, he imagines, “did not require great strength or courage.” Worse, Wes wears brogans and a fedora rather than boots and a Stetson, and he doesn’t even carry a gun. Like Atticus Finch, Wes is self-effacing and lives in the shadow of an older brother, Frank, a charming war hero and local doctor. Wes, Frank, and David are the scions of the Hayden family, which is the closest thing to aristocracy in Mercer County. The patriarch of the Hayden family is Grandfather Hayden, the former sheriff,“a dominating man who drew sustenance and strength from controlling others.” Grandfather never resists an opportunity to browbeat others with his opinions, and somehow, despite his long career as sheriff, he has managed to become one of the richest men in the county. Grandfather,like Joseph Kennedy, now expects Wes to carry on the tradition of power. Again, like Atticus, Wes will experience a conflict between dueling duties. Will Wes be loyal to his family or loyal to the law? Despite his passivity, he does think about whether he will be able to look at himself in the mirror. He also wonders what his son will think of him. He needs a cup to pass from him. Who will deliver him from evil?Also, like in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” there is the undercurrent of racism. Native Americans are subjects of “patronizing and debilitating prejudice.” Wes himself is a gentle bigot: he thinks Native Americans are lazy, ignorant, and irresponsible. It’s not that all the whites in Montana are cruel haters, it’s just that they don’t ever seem to notice the people who cook their meals and wait on them in the stores. They never pause to consider what dreams the indigenous ones may hold.We do know what David’s mom thinks of her husband, early on in this novel, and it does not look promising for Wes. She thinks that Wes, who has a law degree, should escape Montana and grandfather to become his own man as an attorney in Minneapolis. But mom is holding something else back. She thinks that she has discovered and understands the evil at the heart of the Hayden family. Of course, she did not need evidence because she lived by faith and feelings. But she also knows in her soul that she has not yet become the woman that she once dreamed of being as a girl, when she smelled dirt in the pure wind of North Dakota. Whatever her failings, she knows that she must find the strength to battle for her son’s soul. Now, we return back to the questions that I asked at the opening of this review. Must the sins of the father become those of the son? Can we escape the morality that genetics and/or the environment determine to stamp upon us. Larry Watson, I believe, attempts to ask this question but may not attempt to answer it without ambiguity. It seems to me that the success or failure will be a near-run thing. Success involves escape, and escape might cost you all you own. In fact, you might be better off running away with only the clothes on your back. Whatever you do, don't let the family squeeze you into its mold-- unless of course, you want to be preformed jello. Like those seemingly contradictory Bible passages at the beginning of this review (God judges the children; God doesn’t judge the children), I say, “Take your pick. It’s up to you.” But whatever you do, “Don’t blame Montana for your success or your failure. Don't ever blame Montana."May 9, 2012
Coming-of-age books have long captured the interest of readers, from contemporary classics like Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird to Louise Erdrich’s excellent novel The Round House. In the very best of these stories, a young boy or girl is forced to witness the ugliness of society and then must move forward – suddenly older, wiser and sobered.And so it is here with Montana 1948, an absolutely breathtaking and spare novel, with images so searing that the line between reality and fiction was totally blurred.The premise: 12-year-old David Hayden – only son of the Bentrock, Montana sheriff, grandson of the dominating ranch owner and former sheriff, and nephew to the town’s doctor – has its world turned upside down when Marie, the Sioux housekeeper, accuses his uncle of unspeakable things. The aftermath sets brother against brother, son against father, and the plainspoken townspeople against the voiceless Indians. In the space of a few weeks, David will see first-hand what occurs when practicality and expediency are set against moral absolutism and when long-time family loyalty comes crashing against one’s personal sense of what is right and what is just.I cannot give enough accolades for this book. There is not one single excess word; each word reflects the purity of prose that is the mark of only the finest writers. Yet in a mere 169 pages, Larry Watson sets up a situation of such moral complexity – and introduces characters that are so real, vibrant and flawed – that it is literally impossible to read the book in more than one sitting. This superbly rendered novel has all the markings of a classic. It is a near-perfect book. 6 stars.
What do You think about Montana 1948 (1995)?
I liked this, but didn't love it. Montana, 1948 is well-written, simple and direct. It seems more like a short story than a novel. If you're a fast reader, it'll be over before you know it. My favorite parts were the visual descriptions of a small Montana town sixty years ago. I've driven through Montana a few times and always been amazed by the combination of beauty and emptiness. I wasn't as crazy about the plot. Montana is both a crime drama and an examination of the young protagonist's complex family relationships. I was engaged by the characters, but never surprised by anything they did. The bad characters did the wrong thing, the good characters eventually did the right thing and it was always clear to me who was good and who was bad. I guess I wanted more surprises. Of course, the young protagonist is very surprised by the story's events, but, maybe because he is looking back on those events as an adult, everything felt inevitable to me. There was no real tension.This seems like a great book for younger readers (middle school age maybe?). Watson's unpretentious prose is pleasant to read and the story is simple and easy to follow.
—Alice
So clearly, it is an award winning novel and I shouldn't be surprised to give it 5 stars. I also read American Boy a few years back and loved that, so definitely I am a Larry Watson fan. However, for some reason I had it in my head that this was a long cowboy western (kind of like McMurtry's Lonesome Dove) and so had kind of been avoiding it. It's not like that. This is a really great book. And it's also really short. So, I was wrong on a couple of counts.The setting and rough plot (racist relationship between Native Americans and Whites/lawyers and sheriffs and rape) reminded me of The Round House. Cleary, Erdich has read this and most obviously was influenced by it in her writing.I love the gray area of this novel. Watson walks a fine line between passing judgment and empathizing with his characters predicaments. He quite obviously never condones rape or murder, but he makes us understand how hard it is for Wes to not do so. In conjunction we see David's sexual and moral development: he has to learn for himself the complexities of adult interaction. "Looking in the dead bird's eye, I realized that these strange, unthought-of connections-sex and death, lust and violence, desire and degradation-are there, there,deep in even a good heart's chambers."Overall a great read; poignant, compelling, entertaining and interesting.
—Sheri
"Paint. Fresh paint. That's how you find life and civilization. Women come and they want fresh paint."This is a tight-packed novella, on my son's year 10 English syllabus, and with plenty of fodder for high school English teachers to use as socially-prescriptive literature. And while my son might weary of this approach to English, I have the freedom to pursue other works at leisure ... and have long since accustomed myself to the prevailing breeze... You learn to lean in to it.But it's also a very interesting book, and finely crafted. Watson handles the adult-reflecting-upon-childhood voice deftly, and often brilliantly. Some useful narrative ironies are played out, and the tension is well-managed. I rate it more highly than To Kill a Mockingbird for these reasons. "We're---your father is doing what's right.""But we're the ones getting the shitty end of the stick."The theme of 'White Guilt' can certainly be teased out of the white-folks who try to do the right things for the right reasons, or even the wrong reasons; but also, the narrator himself, the 'I' telling of the 'I', and with a sometimes heavily parenthesised sanctimonious tone, making accusations to himself as though to say, see, here, I even accuse myself, as if self-hatred has become the new narcissism, and you can almost here the same voice in the imagined English class ... sans irony, of course. "Don't blame Montana!" he said. "Don't ever blame Montana!"His father's blows on the table stay in the wood. And this is how it ends. Where is the blame? If it's not in the state, in the collective, is it in the individual people? Is it in the fists that are pounding the table? And what the hell is Montana anyway? Montana is now the 'I' looking back and trying to come clean doing the dirty. It's important to realise that the 'I' is now a History teacher, one that doesn't believe in History. But 'I' can still feel the blows in the wood.
—Jeremy
