Hole in the Sky: a Memoir [Paperback]

William Kittredge (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA (1980)
• ASIN: B000N75B72
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lost on the range, June 13, 2003

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hole in the Sky: A Memoir (Vintage) (Paperback)

Kittredge's excellent, thoughtful, and well-written book is a memoir of growing up on a ranch in southeastern Oregon. This is arid country where spring runoff from the mountains gathers in lakes and swamps used for millennia as a stopover by migrating waterbirds. Enter the enterprising Kittredge family, and during the 20th century thousands of acres here were transformed into a vast irrigated ranch, its chief output evolving from cattle to grain to hay to feed milling and feedlots. More to the point, they built an agricultural empire and became wealthy.

The author, born into this world in the 1930s, looks back from the vantage point of 1992, long after leaving the ranch behind and settling in Montana. What he sees is the wreckage of three generations blighted by ambition, greed, arrogance, and no small amount of alcohol. Kittredge talks often about how personal stories illuminate and ground people's lives, yet he and so many of the people around him are directionless and unmoored. His book is a story in which words like "reckless," "hapless," and "heedless" are often used to describe actions.

It is a painful book because there is so much heartache in it, so much confusion, shame, isolation, and fear. There are betrayals, infidelities, friendships and marriages ended, deaths from accidents and mishaps. In all of it, from earliest memories to those of a man on the verge of middle-age, the author describes a deep uncertainty about his own worth and his purpose in life. For many years, it seems to be only the grueling hard work of the ranch, which he only half understands, that keeps him distracted from a sense that nothing is real. (Steady consumption of alcohol and extramarital sex also figure into the mix.)

The book is something of a coming-of-age story about a young man whose manhood continually seems to elude him, well into his thirties. He can go through the motions in the hardworking environment of seasoned cowboys and field hands (an episode in which he takes the place of an injured hay stacker is an example), but he remains unsure of himself, wanting the security of the family ranch, while hating himself for not pursuing the writing career he believes is his real vocation. It's a wonderfully (and frustratingly) complex picture of a young man self-destructing. And in his seeming indifference to his own children, you sense a repetition of the same indifferent parenting that has led him into this emotional cul-de-sac. Significantly, he remarks often about the lack of a guiding hand to show him the way to be a man.

As a kind of confessional, it is a compelling book, and the impact of the story is underscored by the vast Western landscape against which it plays out. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the West and ranch life, cowboys, family sagas, and coming-of-age memoirs. As a companion volume, I'd also suggest Judy Blunt's ranch memoir "Breaking Clean" for its similar themes of emotional dislocation.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dispelling the romantic myth of the American West, September 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Hole in the Sky: A Memoir (Vintage) (Paperback)

I read this book to gain a better understanding of my cowboy neighbors in Eastern Oregon, but I gained so much more. Anyone with a passion for southeastern Oregon will love this book. At times, Kittredge's descriptions of the land are poetic. I found myself driving through Kittredge's Oregon recently, and so much of what he wrote kept leaping to the forefront of my consciousness, stimulating my own fresh perspective of this open country and those who call it home.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tough, sensitive and personal portrait of hopes refound, August 7, 2000

By 

J. Remington "John Remington" (Adams, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hole in the Sky: A Memoir (Vintage) (Paperback)

William Kittredge, like Richard Brautigan, Tom McGuane and William Stafford, uses the modern fall of the Western Myth as a backdrop for creating the personal memoir. In Hole In The Sky, Kittredge mangages to capture the sad fallacy that underscores western machismo with often heartbreaking results. Kittredge pulls off the near impossible in this modern age of weepy pseudo therepy memoir writing: he reveals inner failings without sounding tiresome, whiny or trivial. He writes in a prose style that is devoid of any pretensious posings or trappings. He also captures a true sense of time and space. As my fellow reviewer has said, this book is a must read for anyone about to venture into Eastern Oregon (where I am from) or the rodeo backwater towns of the west. Well worth a look.