Wild, Wild West
A young cowboy chases his destiny.
THE WILLOW FIELD
A Novel
By William Kittredge
Knopf. 342 pp. $25.95
The opening chapters of William Kittredge's new Western are so seductive you'll want to strap on spurs and light out for the territory. The Willow Field spans most of the 20th century and describes a way of life that hung on for decades after the rest of the country slipped into the effete and poisonous modern age. But the most surprising thing about Kittredge's novel is that it's his first. After dozens of essays and short stories and his memoir, Hole in the Sky , it's easy to imagine that you must have read a novel by this 74-year-old writer before. In fact, he and Steven M. Krauzer, a colleague at the University of Montana, wrote nine Westerns under the pseudonym "Owen Rountree" in the 1980s, but this time he's riding solo under his own name and calling the outing his debut.
At the center of this epic is Rossie Benasco. We meet him at 15, working as a "wrango boy on the Neversweat, one of the vast Nevada empire ranches." He's dropped out of school, with the approval of his loving but remarkably tolerant parents, and shacked up with his boss's daughter. Together they enjoy the kind of energetic, ever-ready, guilt-free sex that guys get to have in men's magazines. She's a good cook, too. It's enough to make you weep for the Old West.
But soon enough Rossie feels anxious about settling and getting stuck with a bunch of kids. "What I wonder," he tells his mom, "is how I'm going to amount to anything." And so he abandons his first love -- just for the summer, he tells her -- and hires on with a team to drive 257 horses 1,000 miles to Calgary. Told in a series of gorgeous, jagged-edged anecdotes, it's the ultimate macho adventure: seven weeks of hard horseback riding, eating over an open fire and sleeping under the stars.
This long trek is also a showcase for the startling beauty of Kittredge's prose and his knowledge of the West: "A long day of backland roads across Nevada and into the Oregon deserts followed, past sage-covered ridges with dark mahogany brush up where snows collected in winter drifts and not a house or a traveler or any other person. . . . Mallard drakes flew up as the horse herd jostled through a brokendown gateway to the water, the birds circling and then returning to the tiny weave of desert swamp."
In Calgary, Rossie meets a strange, wildly independent young woman named Eliza, who, like all the women in this novel, can't wait to get Rossie in bed (or field or creek or barn). She's pregnant by an incarcerated Indian, but she steals Rossie's heart, anyhow. "What she's like," he tells a friend, "is there's a field of horses, and one good one, and any damned fool can see the difference." Who couldn't get lucky with lines like that?
Thoroughly whipped, Rossie pursues Eliza back to her parents' house and discovers that, while the rest of the country wallows in the Depression, her family is extraordinarily wealthy. Amid the vast plains of Montana, they live in an oasis of wit and sophistication that only money could enable. Her father's "talk was often nothing Rossie could understand," Kittredge writes, "particularly when it careened into the vagaries of literature and philosophy."
Until this point, the novel seems committed to the tale of a young cowboy "going off to be his own man, to have his own style," but at Eliza's house the epic adventure loses its hi-yo momentum. Rossie tries to decide if he's selling out by staying with Eliza and accepting her parents' largess. "Are these people something I could amount to?" he wonders. "I'm trying to stick with her without turning into a fool who fetches and carries." Rossie can feel himself being domesticated, and that alarms him. Arguing with her one day, he blurts out, "All I want . . . is you and horses and nobody ordering me around," but in these languid chapters that simple longing just fades away. Though all this is sensitively and intricately drawn, the pacing is bovine, and readers mesmerized by the first section of the novel are likely to bolt.
Toward the end, the story suddenly picks up, only to gallop too quickly through the rest of Rossie's life (marine, gubernatorial candidate, grandfather). Kittredge has clearly switched horses on us again and decided to pursue a spotty survey of 20th-century history and land-management issues that would read better in one of his essays. It's a disappointing diffusion of the book's initial energy and beauty, its promise to discover "what could heal the abrasions suffered and delivered while going off to be your own man with horses." ·
Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.
