Seems like there’s always a well-to-do, messed-up family from somewhere else mucking up things for the old-timers - almost always a hard-scrabble, messed-up family whose forefathers and mothers homesteaded the place they’re about to lose.
Generally, things don’t go well for anyone until the newcomers make peace with - or are subdued by - the longtimers.
Until Mary Clearman Blew takes pen in hand.
Yes, “Jackalope Dreams” is a story with familiar themes. No, it is neither predictable nor cartoonish. What Blew has achieved in her first novel is nothing less than stunning: a story beautifully told, characters richly conceived and developed, lessons subtly delivered, complete with shoot-’em-ups, horse wrangling and hidden stashes of cash.
Already, reviewers are comparing Blew’s fiction to that of Larry McMurtry, Willa Cather and William Maxwell. Novelist Ron Hansen thought enough of it to include “Jackalope Dreams” in the University of Nebraska’s Flyover Fiction series, which he edited.
Blew’s is the story of Corey Henry, a just-fired schoolmarm in her late-50s, the spinster daughter of a rodeo legend. Corey’s dismissal, engineered by newcomer Hailey Doggett, ignites a decidedly unpleasant chain of events. Crotchety Loren Henry shoots himself; Corey is left penniless, hounded by the voices of her past; Hailey and wife Rita Doggett discover their drug-addled past has followed them to Montana; and the wind-torn ranchers and townsfolk of Fort Maginnis wonder if - or how - they’ll ever survive so much newness.
Montana readers are familiar with Blew’s earlier works, the essay collection “All but the Waltz,” three books of short stories and the volume she edited, “When Montana and I Were Young: A Memoir of a Frontier Childhood. A creative writing professor at the University of Idaho, she has twice received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.
Indeed, it is the poetry and preciseness of Blew’s writing that set “Jackalope Dreams” apart from others of its ilk. Hers is storytelling of the highest order - never shouting “Look at me,” always compelling introspection and reflection.
When the horses pulling Loren Henry’s casket to the cemetery take off on their ill-equipped young driver, Corey literally takes the reins:
“And now the road to the cemetery is straight and wide and empty, and Corey, her flowered skirt blowing and her teeth full of dust and her hair pulling out of its braid and streaming behind her, feels the tiring lead horses yielding to the drag of lines and bits. What the hell. Four fast horses and an open, hard-surfaced road, let ’em rip. Tire them out, serve them right. Yippee. Yahoo. All the neighbors and gawkers that wanted a sideshow, they might as well get their money’s worth. She may not be much of an artist, and she may not have had sex in years, but she can, by God, drive a four-horse team, just the way Loren taught her.”
And later, when in grief Corey picks up the paints and brushes she set aside - at Loren’s insistence - decades earlier:
“She’s started another animal portrait, this time on the back of her grandmother’s breadboard, and this time in greens, since she’s used up most of her reds. The green faces of deer gaze back at her from the breadboard where it’s propped on the kitchen table, green faces that don’t not quite emerge from the green blades of grass and green leaves, don’t quite disappear.”
In “Jackalope Dreams,” Mary Clearman Blew gives readers what one recent reviewer dubbed “a small masterpiece,” a fictitious - yes - but honest portrait of people and places finding their way, awkwardly, poorly even, but with a raw nobility that defies time or the landscapes it realigns.
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