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B o o k r e v ie w s 311 The W histling Season. By Ivan Doig. N ew York: H arcourt, 2006. 345 pages, $25.00. The Willow Field. By W illiam Kittredge. N ew York: K n opf, 2006. 342 pages, $25.95. Reviewed by O. Alan Weltzien U niversity o f M on tana W estern-D illon 2006 saw a pair of novels published by two senior writers of the northern Rockies region, Ivan Doig and William Kittredge. Doig has carved out his reputation as a historical novelist, and in The Whistling Season, his eighth, he spotlights a rural western institution, the one-room schoolhouse. Kittredge, a short story writer and legendary teacher of writers, has spent most of the past two decades writing nonfiction, but now, at seventy-four, he has published his first novel. The Whistling Season and The Willow Field invite a range of comparisons beginning with the similarity of their titles. Space limitations preclude any sort of comprehensive comparative assessment. I would like to suggest, though, a few common elements, particularly that both novels work as nostalgic fiction. Nostalgia is always a tricky business accompanied by a series of romanticizing risks, but for the most part both writers control or minimize those risks and successfully represent an older Montana or an older West, one that hasn’t been overly burnished. Both novels use a present-day protagonist/narrator who looks back upon earlier episodes in his life. Doig’s Paul Milliron, Montana’s youngest and longestserving superintendent of public instruction, is driving to Great Falls in October 1957 to outmaneuver key legislators in order to control and preserve Montana’s K— 8, one-room schoolhouses. That’s a secondary plot, however. Most of the novel occurs at Marias Coulee in 1909-1910, when Paul is thirteen. Kittredge’s novel covers a slightly longer period, as his Rossie Benasco, in 1991, surveys his whole life. Though Rossie lives most of his life at the lavish Bitterroot spread of his in-laws, the Stephensons, his childhood and young adulthood pass in Nevada, and two-thirds of the novel chronicles 1934, the key year in Rossie’s life. The last part, covering the next fifty-seven years, is punctuated by references to famous American episodes, which appear almost predictably. Occasionally, Kittredge suggests the old Rossie looking back, but mostly we live his life forward, alongside him. The dust jacket of Doig’s novel shows a one-room, wooden schoolhouse with small cupola and attached back room on a rise in a wheatfield, strongly lit by morning or afternoon sun, with a broad brush of blue sky, filled with cumu­ lus puffs, overhead. The photo nicely captures The Whistling Season’s primary setting and success, for the novel keeps close to the motley crew of schoolchil­ dren: Paul, his two younger brothers, and various Swedish or Slavic children whose parents have, like Oliver Milliron, recently arrived in the treeless neigh­ borhood. Their arrivals qualify them as honyockers, a term famously employed by Joseph Kinsey Howard in Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (1943) and 3 1 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 7 used intermittently since. With few exceptions, though, adults don’t matter much in the novel. What does are the series of tracks, like spokes in a wheel, worn in the grasses and converging upon the schoolhouse. Doig gets this site of rural education, still common in my state, exactly right (120-21). It’s as though he has taken that part of Angus McCaskill’s life (in Dancing at the Rascal Fair [1986]) as a pioneer schoolteacher in “Scotch Heaven” and enlarged it. A similar chapter, fraught with peril, occurs in the young life of Mildred Walker’s protagonist, Ellen Webb, in Winter Wheat (1944). Among historical novelists, Doig, a painstaking researcher, does his homework , and The Whistling Season shows, once again, the careful historical context he achieves. In the background of the brothers’ story looms the “Big Ditch,” a massive irrigation project designed to alter, however slightly...

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