Customer Reviews

The Best Short Stories of William Kittredge

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This is a fine collection of stories set in the West by a man who grew up on a big family ranch in southern Oregon and eventually settled as a writer in western Montana. Kittredge is a promoter of other Western writers' talent, editing anthologies like "The Portable Western Reader" for Penguin and helping to bring to the screen a film version of Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It." In this collection of short stories, Kittredge reveals his own particular talents as a Western writer, drawing on his knowledge of rural and small town living in the Great Basin and Montana. His characters are genuine and deeply etched by the western code of individualism, self-sufficiency, and personal freedom. They are also haunted by the dark side of that code - isolation, loneliness, and restlessness.

The men in these stories are strong and independent, both physically and emotionally. But they are not infallible. The women in their lives typically reveal to them things about themselves they'd rather not know. A man who hires a crop-duster to spray his land discovers that the pilot's command of an airplane excites wanderlust in the wife he thought he knew. A 34-year-old man, taking a wife and fathering a child, discovers that she was once the lover of his married brother. A man goes in hunt of a grizzly after the killing of a young woman camper, and in a chilling temptation of fate, puts his life in the hands of another woman to whom he has given his high-powered rifle.

In other stories, a boy's idyllic life collapses into grief when his loving father dies while they are hunting geese in a frozen landscape. A combine operator harvests a field of wheat for a rancher and dies, his intestines perforated by a lifetime of hard work and hard knocks. A penniless cowboy works the ranch of a rich woman he has loved since she was a girl, knowing that "There is nothing to own but what you do." An old man's daughter is shot and killed, and the young man who first romanced her pays a call on her mourning father.

The stories often deal with death or are about the defiance of death, and these themes seem to emerge from the landscape itself - remote, sparsely populated, given to extremes of heat and cold. The characters Kittredge creates are sharply drawn, and their speech is colorful and unschooled. Emotion surges beneath taciturn surfaces. There is tension in their unspoken desires, and for that reason the relationships between men and women are rarely untroubled. I highly recommend this collection of stories for readers interested in the West and the psychological impact of wide-open spaces and unsentimental lives. As a companion book, I'd also recommend Ralph Beer's terrific Montana novel, "The Blind Corral."

Kittredge is best known, perhaps, for his essays on the American West, but some of us old timers have been reading (and loving) his short stories for thirty years now. Bill's prose reinforces the rumors that God sat in on his graduate fiction workshops at the University of Montana back in 1978; his characters take your breath away on their varius paths to self-discovery and self-destruction; and, always, there is the cruel force of the West itself, underlying each and every sentence.

Well written in a brutal way, but there is only so much I can take of stories about depressed, alcoholic macho men who are hurting everyone around them. If you live like this, you might get more out of these characters than I did, but then you would probably not be reading a book in your spare time. You'd be drinking and driving and arguing with your spouse instead.