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Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin by Mary Clearman Blew

2019; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.2019.0043

1948-7142

O. Alan Weltzien,

American Environmental and Regional History

Reviewed by: Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin by Mary Clearman Blew O. Alan Weltzien Mary Clearman Blew, Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2018. 235 pp. Paper, $19.95. Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin represents the latest achievement in Mary Clearman Blew's distinguished career across several genres. She cut her teeth on short stories with two collections (Lambing Out [1977] and Runaway [1990]); a decade after Runaway she published a third collection, Sister Coyote (2000), which includes a novella. Meanwhile, Blew established herself as a first-rate non-fiction writer with a pair of memoirs, All But the Waltz (1991) and Balsamroot (1994). The former stands out as an essential book in late-twentieth-century literature of the northern Rockies. Bone Deep in Landscape: Writing, Reading, and Place (2000) explicitly celebrates her career-l ong commitment to place-based literature. A fourth memoir, This Is Not the Ivy League (2011), hilariously chronicles her adventures and misadventures as faculty and administrator at MSU-Northern (formerly Northern Montana College) in Havre, Montana. Blew writes about patches of Montana less well known but now associated with her. [End Page 218] Blew further demonstrated her versatility by publishing her first novel, Jackalope Dreams, in 2008. Now retired, she continues to show her chops in her second novel a decade later. In both novels the "dreams" of their respective titles concern, at least in part, the efforts to rewrite the past as the female protagonists weather their respective homecomings. Both return with baggage, and both novels' energy derives from these women sorting through their baggage and achieving a hard-won clarity that reconciles their past—particularly their years away—with their home ground in central or Highline Montana, respectively. The protagonist of Ruby Dreams, Ruth (or, variously, Ruby) Gervais, returns to a barely disguised Havre (with "Versailles State" as MSU Northern) to navigate the minefield of her childhood and her ten years on the road as keyboardist and singer in a band, the Idaho Rivermen. She reaches home—the yard of her former piano teacher, Mrs. Pence, who (spoiler alert) turns out to be her grandmother as well—with acute appendicitis, and her physical healing accompanies her emotional healing. Ruby "time travels" into her near or distant past and conceives that past as a magpie nest full of shiny bits of flotsam and jetsam she sifts through and examines. She must rebuild her nest. The piano and her voice prove her salvation as she returns to her grandmother's upright Kimball and relearns specific classical pieces her fingers once knew. Like her long estranged mother, Rosalee (who also hit the road with her voice, living a bad chapter in Monterey, California, before her wayward return home), in singing she expresses her essential self. Though Blew's title points to Janis J., the reigning titular spirit in the novel is Gram Parsons (another suicide), one of whose best songs, "Hickory Wind," a sentimental waltz, wafts across the novel. Its third verse and refrain, "callin' me home, hickory wind," eloquently evokes the pull of Versailles that draws back mother and daughter and, in the climax, finally brings them together (after many years) in song. Ruby Dreams reads fast, its tight construction and short chapters fusing a daunting network of characters. Blew poises a series of character relationships and cross-relationships, a network of tangled [End Page 219] lines, and ably juggles a number of balls. The reader might wish to know more about certain characters than is intimated. What particularly impresses in Ruby Dreams is the pressing weight of Ruth's past, progressively disclosed in the present, like an Ibsen play. We "time travel" as deftly as Ruth and learn new details about her romantic and sexual past with the troubled lead singer/guitarist of the Idaho Rivermen, Gall Marganus. The disclosures about the local witchcraft and Satanic cult paranoia that mars Ruth's childhood (between ages six and eight) after her time in a foster family reads like a miniature episode of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, with Ruth, fearful and confused, testifying against her own mother in a series of allegations ultimately proven false. Versailles's rough summer weather, suffused...