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178 Western American Literature Justice. By Larry Watson. (M inneapolis: M ilkweed Editions, 1995. 226 pages, $17.95.) Larry W atson’s novel Montana 1948 received the 1993 M ilkweed National Fiction Prize and earned w ell-deserved national acclaim. Watson, who teaches at the University o f W isconsin at Stevens Point, has follow ed up his success with a prequel to that novel, a fine collection of stories that extends his evoca­ tive fam ily chronicle, exploring the early lives of various characters from 1899 to 1937. M ontana 1948 was narrated by a middle-aged David Hayden reflecting back on boyhood experiences in northeastern Montana. Justice records inci­ dents in the lives of D avid’s father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, and fam­ ily friend Len M cAuley. Loosely, uninsistently organized around the theme of “justice”— which is variously figured as punishment, moral rebuke, and the sting of felt injustice— the stories gain a cumulative power reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Justice conjures up the same kind of fugitive em otion and secretive nuances of sm all-town behavior. Watson also excels at creating sudden high-tension vignettes. In the lengthy opening story, for instance, four adolescent boys looking for kicks in a dingy North Dakota town meet their humiliating comeuppance in an unforget­ table scene set in a snowy back-alley, with the boys’ trousers and drawers down around their feet. As in M ontana 1948, there is a lyrical, som etim es nostalgic ache as Watson describes the fictional town of Bentrock, Montana. He has an im peccable sense o f detail, whether noting the food at a country wedding (“the platters of steaks and ribs, the bow ls of beans, the stacks o f fresh-baked bread, the crocks of fresh-churned butter, and the pies cut from their tins and stacked three and four high”) or Thursday night poker games in the garage o f a Studebaker dealership. The players “crush out their sm okes right on the oil-stained concrete floor” and use chips “stamped with the letters B.P.O.E. because they once belonged to an Elks Club in another city.” Both Justice and M ontana 1948 have been picked up as trade paperbacks by W ashington Square Press: another sign that Watson is a writer to watch, as he continues to transform an unstoried corner of Montana into his own postage stamp of native soil. MICHAEL KOWALEWSKI Carleton C ollege A B oyhood in the D ust Bowl 1926-1934. By Robert A llen Rutland. (Niwot: U niversity Press o f Colorado, 1995. 133 pages, $22.50.) In outline, Rutland’s early life sounds like som e o f the grimmer passages Reviews 179 in a Dickens novel. After the death of his father when the boy was four years old, his mother left him with her father and stepmother in Okemah, Oklahoma, to find work in larger towns. When the grandfather lapsed into alcoholism and even deeper failure during the Great Depression, his w ife left him to open a disreputable hotel and take up with another man, further cutting the boy off from respectable society. As Rutland’s life came to seem more and more pinched, he increasingly pined for his beautiful mother. Finally she brought him to the shining metropolis of Tulsa for a happy ending worthy of a Victorian novel, couched in language like “The m ystic chords o f memory encourage us to hold on to the moments when life was full o f everyday pleasures and hope, as our youth should always be.” In texture, the book is largely governed by this sentiment, seldom marked by self-pity or by retrospective judgments. Rutland sees adults— few children are described— through a child’s eyes, unaccountable and imperfect but on the whole benign. But except for natives of Okemah and Rutland’s immediate family, readers w ill value the book for its description of the material culture of the town and period: what people wore, ate, played with, drove, and longed for. Because money was scarce, the youthful Rutland knew the price o f most things and, because of deferred or unsatisfied longing...

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