The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan (review)

Set in a vaguely contemporary Montana, Kim Zupan’s first novel features two men, one a young county sheriff’s deputy, the other a killer awaiting trial. Valentine Millimaki has drawn the night shift, spending hours below ground among the darkened cells of petty criminals, and John Gload, a seventy-seven-year-old charismatic sociopath, jailed at the end of a long career of mayhem. Millimaki, filled with guilt and shame associated with his mother’s suicide, can’t sleep, feels his wife slipping away, and spends his hours avoiding the dank cells on search and rescue duty. A perpetually exhausted Val hunts with his dog for lost Montana citizens, whom he often finds dead. The title links killer and jailer through their memories of tilling the land, sowing life rather than death, in hardscrabble country. They share both an intimate knowledge of and love for farm landscapes they’ve escaped. With strong evocations of both populated and outback Montana, the novel offers a meditation on guilt and grace.

The Ploughmen presents some standard themes in western writing—the wages of violence, white vs. black hats, isolated and independent characters in an unforgiving landscape, for example—but Zupan, clearly working with those conventions, complicates them. As is often the case in Montana novels, this is a man’s world, one that is particularly hard on women and children. The body count is pretty high for men, too, but they are more likely to be the victims of circumstance or their own poor judgment than are the women and children. Women are victims or potential victims, unable to thrive in an unforgiving environment populated with dangerous men.

In promotional materials Zupan has been celebrated as a smelterman, a rodeo bareback rider, and a carpenter—in other words, an improbable novelist. But Zupan also earned an mfa at the University of Montana. Such materials set up patronizing expectations that his work will be all action and rough-hewn language from a blue-collar cowboy, rather than revealing the careful joinery of a finish carpenter. Readers have discovered much to admire in this novel, but repeatedly, both professional and amateur reviewers have found the sometimes baroque language both surprising and distracting. While Zupan’s sentences owe more to Faulkner and Mc-Carthy than Hemingway, this observation suggests the difficulty of challenging clichés about western American writing. Zupan manages to turn such expectations on their heads as he provides both his killer and his lowly deputy sheriff with fertile, if troubled, interior lives, a good degree of self-awareness, and vocabularies with a fair number of three-dollar words. Zupan moves stylistically across and between genres—the roman noir, the New American Gothic, the Western—portraying working-class characters involved in complex intimate relationships, difficult friendships, a propensity for conversation (given the right interlocutor), and lush language that works in counterpoint to the often sere landscape. Unmoored from an allegiance to conventionally western style, the richness of Zupan’s language is the book’s greatest strength. Zupan seeks a language to match the scenery, allowing himself to reimagine rather than record landscapes he knows well from experience. The Ploughmen affords readers a fresh reflection on traditional themes, a page-turner of a mystery, and a thorough upending of expectations about the simplicity of working men’s—both criminal and law-enforcing—lives.