All But the Waltz: Essays on a Montana Family by Mary Clearman Blew (review)

246 'WesternAmerican Literature AllBut the Waltz:Essays on a MontanaFamily. By Mary Clearman Blew. (New York: Viking, 1991. 223 pages, $19.95.) Beginning with a story about memory, dreams, and storytelling, Mary Clearman Blew presents a series of interwoven essays which tell the stories of her family’s generations in Montana and, in the process, the story of her origins as storyteller. Blew’s prose is hauntingly vivid, grippingly precise, stoically con­ trolled—it seems to emerge from the very lives she describes for us. The tales she tells are of people who barely survive: “One foot after another, falling back with every step they took, scratching not to get ahead or even to stay abreast but only to keep from sinking for as long as they could.”This is a West of cowboys and ranch life, but divested of romantic myths—except as those mythic expecta­ tions at times shape the destinies of her relatives, usually for worse instead of better. Readers familiar with Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky will immediately com­ pare Blew’s book with Doig’s: both are nonfiction memoirs of their families struggling to survive the rigors of Montana ranch life. Both authors were born in 1939, and both pursued higher education as a means toward self-fulfillment as well as economic independence. Both structure their narratives through the non-linear logic of dream and memory, though Blew’s account is less linear, more associational and thematic than Doig’s. Their narratives differ most in their portrayals of their own lives from puberty on. Blew was raised as the son her father never had and acquitted herself well as a ranchhand. Inevitably, she experienced an identity crisis that Doig never had to face, as she painfully defined what it means to be a woman. Through her narration of her first marriage and the complications pregnancy brought to her undergraduate education, we share her dilemma as an aspiring teenager surrounded by the patriarchal pressures of her husband’s family, and her mature ruminations on why she did what she did. Always, the life stories of her relatives intersect with her own experience, building to the powerful final chapter where we learn her own tale of survival and inheritance. Although there is much here that is grim, Blew’s descriptions endow the windswept landscape with significance and even beauty, and her narratives reveal to us the lives of people who may often seem defeated but in the process have taught the necessary lessons of survival. This is a moving book, convincing in its realism, provocative in its insights, wide-ranging in the themes it explores, and aesthetically pleasing. Blew has previously published two collections of her short stories. We can only wonder what further pleasures await us in the years ahead. BARBARA HOWARD MELDRUM University ofIdaho ...