Crow Fair

April has been a hectic and enlightening month. The days are getting longer and the air is warming. Flowers are beginning to bloom outside, gently, as if they still remember the winter, which stayed longer than usual. It's nice to see the familiar patterns, but I can't shake the feeling that the long and tragic season of winter was just one of several disturbances yet to come. Global warming, etc.

Anyway, I finished a book recently called Crow Fair. I got this book as a present. It is named after a Native American ceremony which I know nothing about. The book didn't have anything to do with Native Americans either, except in perhaps a tangential sense. This book was set in Montana, which is built, I suppose, on the bones of Native Americans. What a sensational notion! Every state in America is built on the bones of Native Americans, but for some reason or another it was the people of the northern plains who have stuck around in our public memory. Maybe it was because they fought for the longest, maybe it's because those were the places where white America was stretched the thinnest, only a fragile veneer tearing in the wind that blows across the water color steppes and gray mountains. It is the center point of our continent and it is large and flat and mostly devoid of the modernity of the coastal civilizations. I have only lived on the coasts. I know nothing about the middle. After reading this book, I feel like I know a little bit more, but its just a feeling.

Thomas McGuane has a style which is unlike any author I've read, although I can see the influences of many writers reflected in his work. Perhaps that is the mark of a post-post-modernist; a 21st century writer is fated to recycle old things into new things. To pick up the broken trail left by Brautigan, Kerouac, and Vonnegut and try to make it lead somewhere. I know that somewhere out there an expert in feminist literature just died as a result of me writing that sentence. I'm sorry. I would read more 21st century women writers if I knew about them. I'll make it a sub-goal for this year, I promise.

Thomas McGuane writes in a way that seems easy and effortless, and that's what I like about it. The stories were very nice to read, but they hit you hard in the last moments and also immediately afterwards. A couple of the stories really stood out above the rest, but overall it was a really solid collection. No wasted words. That would be my three word review, but its not completely accurate. "No wasted words" sounds like Hemingway. It's not minimalism in a tortured sense, just simple and truthful. One adjective per noun type of writing. I loved it. I was inspired by it. Most importantly, I enjoyed reading it. The fact that I received it as a gift, and it had such a profound impact on me makes it even better. I have a bad habit of saving my appreciation for the purchases I make for myself, believing, on some deeper level, that no one could understand me well enough to hit the mark with a gift or surprise. It's nice to be proven wrong.