Russell RowlandRezensionen

Cold Country by Russell Rowland is a very highly recommended character study wrapped around a murder mystery.

In 1968 Tom Butcher is found murdered one morning in the ranching community of Paradise Valley, Montana. By all public accounts, Butcher was a boisterous, popular man, although it seems more than one person may have had a reason to kill him. Blame falls quickly on the new man, Carl Logan, who recently moved with his family to the area to manage wealthy Peter Kenwood’s ranch. The community is upset that long-time ranch hand Lester Ruth wasn't given the job. It doesn't help that Carl's ten-year-old son, Roger, is causing waves by standing up to the local school bully. The investigation becomes even more complicated when it is revealed to Junior Kirby, a lifelong rancher and Butcher’s best friend, that Butcher had a secret he had been hiding.

The writing is excellent. Rowland expertly captures the small town, hard-working atmosphere of this ranching community, where everyone seems to know everything about everyone else, and all the many grievances and failings of others are not really forgotten. Lifelong friendships can be a struggle at best when you have to trust your neighbors, even amid the many reasons they might not be trustworthy. And that doesn't even include the secrets people hide.

The murder mystery keeps the narrative moving along, but the real exploration is the examination of the heart of the characters. Rowland quickly establishes his characters in the setting and shows their actions and inner thoughts, including members of the same family. The people in Paradise Valley all have many differences that should pull them apart, but they have learned to try and keep their mouths shut and work together. Butcher was not as well-liked as it seems, but it is a universal truth that it is easier for residents to point blame at the new guy rather than examine their life-long neighbors. The murder mystery is solved at the end, but the pleasure is in the journey.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Dzanc Books.

http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2019/11/cold-country.html½

Great sense of place and people....perfectly named protagonist, too: Pete Hurley. Can't you see him toeing the rubber, looking in? But poor Pete is far from perfect aside from his name. His story is one of hubris, self-destruction and redemption, and Rowland keeps us engaged all the way through his precise language, humor and human insight. Highly recommended.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

(Originally written for the Billings Gazette, and reprinted here with their kind permission.)

It's become almost a cliche by now, the rich and famous who build upper-class rural estates in Montana so to "get away from it all," unfortunately instead bringing it all with them to the consternation of locals; so it would make sense that writers would find it interesting to fashion novels out of such a dramatic conceit, like Billings author Russell Rowland has done in his latest, High and Inside, his third book after multiple best-of-the -year picks In Open Spaces and The Watershed Years. And Rowland adds to the drama by making this a redemption story too, not just a famous person moving to Montana but an infamous person fleeing there -- disgraced major-league pitcher and raging alcoholic Pete Hurley, that is, whose drunken errant pitch that ended the career of a saintly Dominican up-and-comer has inspired a national movement towards more safety in baseball, and who on top of everything else also accidentally paralyzed his girlfriend after they both took an unluckily serious tumble while in a blackout fugue. Hurley has come to Bozeman not necessarily for its charms, but merely to get as far away from everyone else as he can, although he's convinced himself that he's come so to accomplish the pipe dream of building an entire house by himself; but that's what gives us one of the first clues as to how damaged he actually is, in that he has an almost comical lack of knowledge about tools or construction, just one of the many elements (including haranguing in-laws, a sexy but tough neighbor, and a three-legged dog) that keeps our anti-hero on his wobbly toes throughout the course of this tragicomedic novel.

And to be sure, we're supposed to have an ambivalent attitude towards our hard-to-love protagonist; a runaway addict still in deep denial, Hurley has the habit of making things even harder on himself by picking drunken fights with the people who could've helped him the most (for example, the city employee in charge of approving and overseeing construction projects, standing in for every local who's ever gotten angry at an encroaching outsider), as well as scaring his young nephews on a regular basis and creeping out females in a whole variety of different ways. And that's of course a big part of this novel's entire point, to show our hero at his worst so that we can follow along as he gets better, a classic bottoming-out story but with a lot more than usual at stake. Rowland handles such a story with a lot of aplomb and maturity, turning in a novel by turns funny and serious that takes its time getting to its point.

But unfortunately, High and Inside has its problems too, in a few cases pretty big ones that pull the book's overall enjoyment level down a couple of notches. Chief among them, for example, is Rowland's habit to trust neither himself nor his audience and turn in many moments too broadly; after all, this is a man who not only caused one of the most horrific injuries in the history of baseball because of his drinking problem (a 100-MPH pitch straight into a man's eye socket), but then just a few months later permanently paralyzed his girlfriend, a bit of an overkill when all is said and done, and there are multiple other examples here of Rowland sometimes going too big, or sometimes too sentimental, or sometimes too melodramatic. Plus, he's chosen some details for his characters and settings that can sometimes approach hackneyed from overuse; and like a lot of authors of more slowly paced stories, Rowland has a habit of sometimes including entire scenes that only exist to spell out little inconsequential niceties ("And then they had dinner, and then they engaged in small talk, and then everyone went home") that ultimately have nothing to do with either the plot or the characters' growth.

All in all, though, High and Inside was an enjoyable read, as long as you keep your expectations reasonable going into it, a solid character study that shows off the Montana culture and landscape in an engaging way. It comes somewhat recommended to a general audience, and more to those who specifically enjoy good stories about addiction and recovery.

Out of 10: 8.1

Well written, occasionally more descriptive than essential to story -- captured eloquently the manner of communication (largely unspoken) among peoples of the area/time. Character portrayal was excellent for the most part. Poignant yet with hope, strength Intend to read another of his books.

Topographically, Montana looks like a half-crumpled sheet of paper. The western side is wrinkled with mountains, puddled with lakes, and sluiced by rivers. This is the part of the state which, when you run your fingers over a topo globe, feels like that paper-mache project you made in second grade. But let your fingers travel eastward and somewhere around 109 degrees longitude the sheet of paper flattens out. Here, the landscape is barren of Rocky Mountain upthrust and the only waterfall you're likely to see is when a customer accidentally knocks a glass off the table at CC's Family Café in Glendive.

Miles City. Sanders. Sand Springs. Broadus. Even the names of the towns sound like prairie grass hissing in the wind. This unwrinkled side of the state can be unforgiving with its blizzards, droughts and skin-withering wind; but it can be just as beautiful with its skyscraper-size clouds, undulating hills and blanket of welcome silence. On some roads, you can drive for hours before seeing a car in the opposite lane. When you do, you lift one finger off the steering wheel by way of greeting then drive on, your mingled plumes of dust still hanging over the road like mist. It's not the easiest of places to live; you either love it, or you leave it.

I tell you all this by way of introduction to Russell Rowland's novel In Open Spaces so that you'll know you're entering a particular (and often peculiar) place when you open its pages. As you might expect from people who have been battered by bad weather and rotten luck but remain upright as stubborn cottonwoods, Eastern Montanans can be a quiet, determined group of folks. You don't have to be stoic to live here…but it helps. As one character in Rowland's novel observes, the land "beats the holy hell out of folks."

The family at the center of In Open Spaces, the Arbuckles, sure has taken its share of beatings, starting on page ten when the book's narrator, Blake, is standing in his eighth-grade classroom fifty miles from the family ranch and gets a heart-squeezing telegram from his mother: Brother George drowned in river. Those five words resonate throughout the rest of the novel, which follows the fortunes and misfortunes (but mostly misfortunes) of the Arbuckles from 1916 to 1946.

Blake suspects his older brother Jack might have had something to do with eldest brother George's death, but in true Montana fashion, he says nothing about it to anyone else. The family also keeps its collective trap shut when hot-blooded Jack gets in a fight with his father and abruptly leaves the ranch to join the Army. Little is said years later when he returns with a new wife, Rita—a woman who ignites romantic feelings inside Blake. This is just one more complication for the guy—he's already struggling with questions about Jack's loyalty and whether he has the right to be the next heir in line to own the family ranch. When youngest brother Bob brings his new bride, Helen, back to live on the ranch, the entire family fractures and nearly disintegrates. But it’s the land which continues to bind them together.

The author, a fourth-generation Montanan who now lives in San Francisco, has an feel for his characters and their land that's as intimate as a husband running his fingers across his wife's body. Rowland knows Montana like the husband knows his wife's hip.

It's quieter still at night, when you can sit for hours at a stretch and hear nothing except the crickets, or the occasional cluck of a chicken. At night, the darkness seems to add to the silence, making it heavier, somehow more imposing. It is a silence that can be too much for some, especially people who aren't fond of their own company. And it seems that living in such silence makes you think twice before speaking, or laughing, or crying. Because when sounds are that scarce, they carry more weight.

Silence settles over the Arbuckle family in these pages, too. When they do crack their lips to speak, you can hear the jawbones groan.

This novel is filled with smothered dreams and unrequited longing—Blake has a successful tryout with a scout from the St. Louis Cardinals, but squelches that ambition to return to his duties on the ranch. In Open Spaces teems with the kind of family drama you'd normally find the Old Testament. It's a big, potentially messy plot, but Rowland never lets the reins slip from his hands.

Though the story whips along across the years, it's lyrical enough to slow down and savor the finer details of ranch life—everything from family dinners to county dances. There's one particularly gritty scene involving a cow and a prolapsed uterus which is as gripping as anything I've read in a long time. Rowland had me right there in that barn, elbow-deep inside that mother cow, grimed with muck and blood. More than once, I had to tell myself to breathe.

In Open Spaces reminds us that the world was a capricious, dangerous place less than 100 years ago. Spinal meningitis, snowstorms, starvation, getting stomped by a horse—these are all dangers which threaten the book's characters. As the Arbuckle patriarch is fond of saying, "Always expect the worst, and you'll never be disappointed." Blake adds:
Although he did expect the worst, expecting the worst had never prevented disappointment. In fact, my father not only experienced disappointment, day after day, but he had built his life around it. And I see now that it was a common quality among our people, to live with a wary knowledge that things could always get worse. To not enjoy accomplishment because of the certainty of more disappointment. It was an attitude born of experience, as a bumper crop of wheat, and a bountiful year, could change to failure in the time it took for a hailstone to bounce off your head.

Reminiscent of two other great Montana family sagas, Norman MacLean's A River Runs Through It and Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall, In Open Spaces is an engrossing literary journey—once started, it's hard to lift your eyes from the page.