Dancing At The Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig (review)

Reviews 169 pective backers that Willie and Waylon and Roy Acuff and Eddie Raccoon and everybody will show up for the Big Event. He finally finds a backer: a West Texas lunatic who will almost certainly kill Joe if the concert fails. And, no question, it will. It takes all the effort of the Ringer clan and their cousins to spring Joe from the trap he has laid for himself. Ringer, Marshall Terry’sfirst novel since Tom Northway (1968), isfunny and entertaining. Terry does a good job with his main character, Bill “Bubba” Ringer, and creates some lively caricatures of the rest of the cast. The author is especially good at capturing the flavor of Dallas in the eighties. JAMES WARD LEE The University of North Texas Dancing At The Rascal Fair. By Ivan Doig. (New York: Atheneum, 1987. 406 pages, $18.95.) Ivan Doig’s new book will delight and challenge any reader. Language responsive to the demands and joys ofenvironment presents the initial pleasure; but an even greater satisfaction is the discovery that once again Ivan Doig is taking chances. Dancing At The Rascal Fair, a narrative of events which pre­ cede those described in the 1984 English Creek, follows the lives of Angus McCaskill and Rob Barclay, two friends who emigrate from Nethermuir, Scotland to Gros Ventre, Montana. As narrator, Angus writes out of memory of his friend and presents numerous scenes—storm on the Atlantic, a sheep shearing contest, his consummated love with Anna Ramsay, a life-threatening blizzard—which will satisfy those readers who have come to expect from Doig the interrelating of language and event. But Ivan Doig’s skills—and importance to western American writing— extend beyond the ability to recreate verbally memorable moments. In fact, one of the dangers that Doig continually faces is the appearance of being little more than verbally facile, a sort of James Michener of the American North­ west. A novel which extends, as this one does, over several decades, two conti­ nents, and a variety of life experiences can appear to be self-indulgent; if the reader does not have a reason to be interested in the characters or events, certain scenes may seem to argue for tighter editing. And at moments—for example, those detailing the growth of Gros Ventre or the sheep-shearing contest—Rascal Fair runs that risk. What generates all of Doig’s work, how­ ever, is the imaginative and verbal effort to respond to the energies of life’s surfaces. Spatially and temporally, Doig delights in the events of life; his chal­ lenge is to verbalize that delight; the risk is that he appear little more than a skilled chronicler of a place and people. The title of Dancing At The Rascal Fair refers to “that day of fest when Nethermuir farmers and farm workers met to bargain out each season’s wages 170 Western American Literature and terms and put themselves around a drink or so in the process . . . one day of magic filled . . . [with] color and laughter” (12). Unlike his friend Rob, McCaskill takes pleasure in life’s rhythms; he wants to see, says Anna Ramsay, “how many ways life can rhyme” (192). His narrative isone of those efforts at dancing with life, but in Doig that means dancing with storms both of the country and of the heart while keeping your head above water, blizzard, drought, and desire. That dance takes place not just in plot, but most impor­ tantly in narrative vision and language. Ivan Doig has taken chances before—• in This House ofSky and Winter Brothers— and he does soagain with Dancing At The Rascal Fair. The book needs more than one reading in order to get from the plot to the dance, but it works and works well. A. CARL BREDAHL University of Florida Rats Alley. By John H. Irsfeld. (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1987. 201 pages, $16.50.) There’s nothing subtle in Irsfeld’scontinued treatment of a modern Texas socioscape. He uses a boy’s brutal murder by an explosive policeman, an exten­ sive cover-up, and a father’s careful, doomed efforts at revenge to illustrate his sense that...