MONTANA 1948

 

by Larry Watson

 

Washington Square Press

ISBN 0-671-50703-6

 

Hemingway liked to say that stories have two levels──one on the surface, another beneath the surface. The Afterward to Larry Watson's Montana 1948 suggests something beneath the surface, a revisionist history of the West. The idea is that the novel's white doctor, also a war hero, represents the once popular view that white America stood for something good, something heroic, something we should respect. What Watson's novel reveals is how such a man is also a racist who commits terrible misdeeds.

If so, then our conscience is the doctor's brother, a sheriff crippled by a horse accident, and who owes his job, and his status, to his all-powerful father. We see the sheriff's struggle to reconcile his moral obligations with those he owes his brother and father through the lens of the sheriff's own son, a child whose loss of innocence becomes our own. And like us, the boy would naturally prefer to ride across the Montana plains on his grandfather's horse than discover the awful truth of his uncle's misdeeds.

Do we need revisionist history? That depends on whether we learn anything from it, whether we think any clearer, whether we understand ourselves and anyone else any better.

We don't need it to be pulled through Watson's fine novel. The story on the surface of the page impels us forward with prose as clean and clear as stream water. You might not even consider the story on any deeper level until you read the Afterward. And that's high praise.

 

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