MONTANA 1948: BOOK REVIEW

A lean sparse narrative evokes, almost unerringly, the time, place and ghosts inhabiting the semi-Badlands of the northeastern Montana high line and the lives of the departed survivors. The author Larry Watson, through the voice of boy and man, lures the reader and quickly sets the hook:

"From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them...

A young Sioux woman lies on a bed in our house. She is feverish, delirious, and coughing so scared I am afraid she will die.

My father kneels on the kitchen floor, begging my mother to help him. It's a summer night and the room is brightly lit. Insects cluster around the fixtures, and the pleading quality in father's voice reminds me of those insects--high- pitched, insistent, frantic. It is a sound I have never heard coming from him.

My mother stands in our kitchen on a hot, windy day. The windows are open, and Mother's lace curtains blow into the room. Mother holds my father's Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun, and since she is a small slender woman, she has trouble finding the balance point of its heavy length. Nevertheless, she has watched my father and other men often enough to know where the shells go, and she loads them until the gun will hold no more. Loading the gun is the difficult part. Once the shells are in, any fool can figure out how to fire it. Which she intends to do."

A slim book of 169 pages races to the climax at the pace, intensity and inevitability of a Great Northern Empire Builder streaking and shrieking its doppler effect across the Mercer County prairie. As one of the many enthusiastic reader blurbs noted, you can start reading at 10:00 a.m. and finish in the wee hours of the morning. I think he reads very slowly.

Apart from cowboys and Indians, gun smoke and coyotes, the book mostly recounts a densely packed psychodrama of unspoken though overheard skeletons rattling in the family closet, or basement rather. For a genealogist, skeletons rattling lead to further investigations, for instance the Heid Janssen murders featured in a previous and future postings. A generation or two of separation serves to make these ghosts abstract and bearable, but the immediately surviving generation leaves most of the telling unsaid.

Those that stay with the serialized saga of the extended Bell, Holzworth, Siegle, Guelff, Metzger, Schwinden, Grein, Beck, Smith (Schmidt), Repogle, Vogeler, Mauch, Schlichenmeir, Emerick, et al families, Montana 1948 may be a useful guide to achieve some empathy with the the survivors of these tragedies.

Watson writes a well crafted story as attested by the many awards conferred upon the book, but the literary pretensions do not get in the way of a good read. Sometimes Watson does not leave quite enough to the reader's imagination, and the narrative voice becomes a little intrusive, but this hardly amounts to more than an occassional minor annoyance. Because the book strives so hard to reflect the time, mood and place, one or two anachronisms will catch the attention of the native reader, e.g. a reference to Montana State University in Bozeman when, in 1948, Montana State College in Bozeman had not yet attained university status.