Prairie Nocturne: A Novel (Doig, Ivan) [Hardcover]

Ivan Doig (Author)

Book Description

Series: Doig, Ivan | Publication Date: October 14, 2003

From one of the greatest novelists of the American West comes a surprising and riveting story set in Montana and New York during the Harlem Renaissance, drawing together an unlikely set of thwarted performers in one last inspired grasp at life's set of gold rings: love and renown.

Susan Duff -- the bossy, indomitable schoolgirl with a silver voice from the pages of Doig's most popular work, Dancing at the Rascal Fair -- has reached middle age alone, teaching voice lessons to the progeny of Helena's high society. Wesley Williamson -- business scion of a cattle-empire family -- has fallen from the heights of gubernatorial aspirations, forced out of a public career by political foes who uncovered his love affair with Susan. Years later, Susan is taken off guard when Wes arrives at her door with an unusual request: to train his chauffeur, Monty, in the ways of voice and performance.

Prairie Nocturne is the saga of these three people and their interlocked destinies. Monty is distantly known to Susan from their childhoods in the Two Medicine country, yet an enforced stranger because of the racial divide. When she realizes he possesses a singing voice of rare splendor, Susan joins Wes's Pygmalion-like project to launch Monty on a performing career -- only to find the full force of the Ku Klux Klan in their way. As Monty and Susan overcome treacherous obstacles, Wes's mysterious motives unsettle everyone, including himself, and the trio's crossed fates form a deeply longitudinal novel that raises everlasting questions of allegiance, the grip of the past, and the costs of career and passion.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his rambling, sluggishly paced seventh novel, noted western novelist Doig explores the discord that racism sows in the Montana wilderness during the Roaring 20s. Susan Duff, the schoolgirl nightingale from his Montana trilogy's middle book, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, is now in her 40th year, unmarried, working in Helena giving singing lessons to the upper crust. Her former adulterous lover, the charismatic WWI hero and once gubernatorial hopeful Wes Williamson, reappears and persuades Susan to abandon her other students in order to develop the untrained voice of his African-American chauffeur, Monty Rathbun, with an eye to putting him on the professional stage. Because Monty is black, Susan moves the lessons to the seclusion of her family ranch in mountainous Two Medicine country. But overnight prosperity from oil and copper has brought motorcars and telephones, so secrets are not easily kept. Soon, the KKK makes its presence felt, and Susan's home is vandalized. Though Wes quickly routs the bigots, Monty flees, resurfacing in New York during the Harlem Renaissance, where he attains overnight celebrity as a singer of spirituals. Of course, for black men and adulterous lovers in the 1920s, the course of fame and secret passion is still fraught with peril, and more trouble lies in wait for all. The fine plot is disrupted by frequent flashbacks, paeans to unspoiled landscape, Scottish genealogy and western lore, but those who don't mind digressive storytelling will appreciate yet another Montana saga from one of the state's best-known chroniclers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Doig returns to several of the characters from his much-loved Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987) in this gripping story set not only in Montana's Two Medicine country, the landscape indelibly associated with the author, but also in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. It's 1924, and Susan Duff, the headstrong schoolgirl from Rascal Fair, is now a middle-aged voice teacher in Helena, resigned to spinsterhood after her affair with gubernatorial candidate Wes Williamson cost him the election. Then Wes seeks her out with a proposition: teach his black chauffeur, Monty, to sing. Returning to Two Medicine country, Susan does just that, as the narrative twists and turns its way back into the pasts of the three principal characters and ahead into their shared futures in New York: Monty on the concert stage and Susan and Wes, their relationship still tumultuous, in the wings. As always, Doig incorporates a vast amount of fascinating historical material into his personal drama: the story of the "Buffalo soldiers" of the tenth cavalry in the late nineteenth century; the saga of the Ku Klux Klan's incursion into Montana; and, of course, the Harlem Renaissance itself. The heart of the matter, though, is the three-sided relationship among Susan, Wes, and Monty; skirting the melodrama into which this triptych might easily have tumbled, Doig tightens the reins on his sometimes mannered prose and constructs a subtle, highly textured love story, nicely balancing period detail and well-modulated emotion. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (October 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743201353
• ISBN-13: 978-0743201353
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,118,269 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ivan Doig is the author of ten previous books. Seven are novels, including English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and three are nonfiction, including the highly acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former ranch hand, newspaperman, and magazine editor, Doig holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. He lives in Seattle.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Richly textured, multi-layered. . ., June 23, 2004

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Prairie Nocturne: A Novel (Doig, Ivan) (Hardcover)

The full significance of this novel's evocative title does not become clear until the very closing pages, and that's fitting for a melodrama-historical-romance that holds its cards very close to the chest right up to each turn of the plot. There are in fact several narratives and themes that weave in and around each other, and Doig is careful to balance them artfully so that each new development has an element of the unexpected for the reader.

The texture of Doig's narrative style is richly detailed, like tapestry. His characters and the exchanges between them spring strongly to life. You do not speed read for the plot but linger over the nuances of behavior, gesture, verbal inflection, thought, and feeling. Meanwhile, a compelling story is told of a black ranch hand and rodeo clown who is transformed under the guiding hand of a white voice teacher to become a rising star in the music world.

Set in the 1920s, the story also portrays the social forces and prejudices that intrude on their growing relationship. And the reader learns how the KKK reached as far west as Montana with its use of secrecy and intimidation to enforce a code of racial and ethnic discrimination. Just as ugly, though not resorting to hoods and sheets, are those at the very highest social rungs who have their part to play in enforcing racial divisions.

Set primarily in Montana, the book needs to look back only a generation to the immigrant homesteaders of the 1880s, the cavalry posts on the plains, the rise of the cattle barons, and the subduing of the Native Americans. Meanwhile, the trenches of WWI inhabit recent memory. The book captures the breadth of American life from the closing frontier on the one hand to jazz-age New York and the Harlem Renaissance on the other.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the historical West, relationships between strongly independent characters, the African-American experience, singing and voice training, and a richly textured, multi-layered style of storytelling. Doig is a master.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Montana woman teaches rodeo clown to sing the blues., December 30, 2003

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Prairie Nocturne: A Novel (Doig, Ivan) (Hardcover)

Alone, independent, and now in her forties, DANCING AT THE RASCAL FAIR's Susan Duff returns as one of three principal characters in Ivan Doig's seventh novel, PRAIRIE NOCTURNE. Set in 1924 Helena and in Montana's Two Medicine country wilderness, World War I hero and failed gubernatorial candidate, Wes Williamson, surprises his former paramour, Susan, with a request that she teach Monty Rathbun how to sing. The son of a buffalo soldier, Monty is a chauffer and former rodeo clown. Because he is black, Monty's rise to celebrity eventually stirs up racial prejudice in a subplot involving the local Ku Klux Klan. Though well written, blending a lovely story with plenty of Western history, landscape and lore, Doig's novel, much like a prairie, rambles on endlessly at times; Doig's PRAIRIE also tends to be dogged with digressions. But this is my only criticism of an otherwise satisfying historical novel, written by one of the finest Western writers spinning yarns today.

G. Merritt

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Return to Two Medicine Country, October 19, 2003

By 

Ron Franscell, Author of 'Sourtoe Cocktail Club' - See all my reviews

This review is from: Prairie Nocturne: A Novel (Doig, Ivan) (Hardcover)

It should come as no surprise to any fan of western literature that Ivan Doig has returned to the necessary soil of Montana to tell his latest story. But that he has combined his familiar landscape and characters with a new twist might cause a pleasant wonder.

In "Prairie Nocturne," the West?s pre-eminent literary novelist rides the wide-open range between Montana and New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, gathering a cast of players for one last inspired grasp at love and celebrity.

In a Faulknerian flourish that has threaded through five of his six previous novels, Doig again populates his seventh with some familiar faces in old settings. What Doig fan would be astonished to find the indomitable Angus McCaskill making more than a cameo appearance in Doig?s newest novel?

And lest any reader think Doig?s beloved landscape has been relegated to a cameo appearance shorter than any McCaskill?s, fear not. No western writer ? and Doig is the prime living model for that species ? can escape the ageless countryside?s effect on either character or author.
Doig?s poetic prose is growing richer and more subtle with each book, like a stone in a river. In "Prairie Nocturne," as the narrative entwines the pasts and presents of its three principal characters, his essential themes re-emerge: family, landscape, childhood memory, loyalty, and the inescapability of our past.

Doig?s characters, new and old, are unforgettable, and not just because he keeps bringing them back to life in subsequent books. He embroiders them with history, myth and sensuality. Combined with the timeless beauty of his own ancestral ground, they are fast becoming as much a part of the American mind-scape as the Snopes family of Yoknapatawpha.