Red Rover by Deirdre McNamer
2008; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.2008.0001
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoB o o k R e v ie w s 2 1 3 While the collection feels uneven, McGuane populates his stories with finely wrought portraits of failure, many high functioning, who nevertheless continue to seek out meaningful connections with family, friends, lovers, and their own pasts. In many stories, McGuane shows how, even in a thoroughly globalized West, characters continue to seek Wallace Stegner’s “native home of hope.” Red Rover. By Deirdre McNamer. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007. 264 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by O. Alan Weltzien University of M ontana Western, Dillon Recent criticism of the FBI as a federal agency incorporates, in spirit if not fact, the voluminous, trenchant criticism of its longest serving and most notorious director, J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, this agency may never outlive “the Old Man,” as he’s repeatedly invoked in Deirdre McNamer’s new novel, Red Rover. The novel, a deft exercise in suspense fiction, captures both the idealism of World War II recruits to the FBI and the unchecked paranoia and tyranny exercised by the agency in the following Cold War era. McNamer set her first two novels in her native Highline region of Montana, the second, One Sweet Quarrel (1994), establishing her credentials as a historical novelist. Her third novel, My Russian (2000), takes place mostly in Missoula, where McNamer has lived and worked for a long time. With Red Rover, she shifts the setting between the Cut Bank/Sweetgrass Hills and Missoula (with a few scenes in Butte and elsewhere), moving back and forth between the years 1946 and 2003. These prove the pivotal years in the main characters’ intertwined story. Part of Red Rover’s success lies in its graceful travels in time across its twenty-three chapters (each chapter prefaced with a year and a location). In the present, she easily conveys the physical debilitations and reduced capacity of old age in several characters. In the historical chapters, she gets the details right so that these periods and loca tions are convincingly evoked. Red Rover opens and closes in Neva, Montana, McNamer’s fictionalized home terrain, and her representation of the small town on the Montana prairie beyond the Rocky Mountain front, eternally windswept, with the three isolated Sweetgrass Hills looming to the northeast, ably expresses its stark beauty and isolation. Red Rover focuses on two brothers, Aidan and Neil Tierney, and Aidan’s friend, Roland Talliafeno. The mystery of Aidan’s murder, passed off as a sui cide or “accident” in 1946, is explained in a way that also illuminates Roland’s haunted, alcoholic life. As an old man, through a chance meeting in a reha bilitation center, Roland confesses to Neil what, in 1946, he was sworn to secrecy never to reveal. Part of the novel’s critique of the FBI derives from the way it positions Roland against his best buddy in its bid for loyalty. The agency 2 1 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 8 also ignored Aidan during and after his top-secret espionage work in the war, an experience that left him with an unexplained, untreated gastrointestinal disease that literally wasted him away. Aidan had turned critical of the FBI during those years, his “G-man” idealism destroyed, and the price of disloyalty was his own destruction. The novel opens and closes in the Sweetgrass Hills close by the central hill, “the Tower,” where the eighty-five-year-old Neil, seeing the world anew after cataract surgery, looks back upon his childhood self and the older brother he’d lost fifty-seven years earlier. McNamer’s lyricism, her poetic cadences, serve as backdrop to moving portraits of brothers and best friends, and these portraits underscore, by contrast, the critique of a federal agency marked, too often, by paranoia and incompetence. The Nature of Home: Taking Root in a Place. By Greta Gaard. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. 213 pages, $17.95. Reviewed by Candace Barlow University of Washington, Seattle As a teacher and scholar, Greta Gaard frames her book (a...
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