Sundown, Yellow Moon: A Novel [Hardcover]

Larry Watson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 2007

On an icy day in January 1961, in Bismarck, North Dakota, a sixteen-year-old boy walks home from high school with his best friend, Gene. The sudden sound of sirens startles and excites them, but they don’t have long to wonder what the sound could mean. Soon after seeing police cars parked on their street, the boys learn the shocking truth: hours before, Gene’s father, Raymond Stoddard, walked calmly and purposefully into the state capitol and shot to death a charismatic state senator. Raymond then drove home and hanged himself in his garage.

The horrific murder and suicide leave the community reeling. Speculation about Raymond’s motives run rampant. Political scandal, workplace corruption, financial ruin, adultery, and jealousy are all cited as possible catalysts. But in the end, the truth behind the day’s events died with those two men. And for Gene and his friend, the tragedy is a turning point, both in their lives and in their friendship.

Nearly forty years later, Gene’s friend, a writer, revisits the tragedy and tries to unravel the mystery behind one man’s inexplicable actions. Through his own recollections and his fiction–sometimes impossible to separate–he attempts to make sense of a senseless act and, in the process, to examine his youth, his friendship with Gene, and the love they both had for a beautiful girl named Marie.

Spare, haunting, lyrical, Sundown, Yellow Moon is a piercing study of love and betrayal, grief and desire, youth and remembrance. Using a brilliant, evocative fiction-within-fiction structure, Larry Watson not only brings to life a distinct period in history but, most affectingly, reveals the interplay of memory, secrets, and the passage of time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The unnamed, not-entirely-reliable narrator of this novel of obsession from Watson (In a Dark Time) aims his imaginative faculties at discovering, through fiction, the truth of an incident from his adolescence in Bismarck, N.Dak. In trying to figure out why, in 1961, his best friend's father shot a state senator and then hanged himself, the writer tries out a number of different scenarios via short fictions and simple speculation, including mental illness, romantic rivalry, a festering real estate swindle and a looming corruption scandal. The fictions-within-a-fiction are a clever conceit, but ponderous discussion of the pieces weakens it. More problematic is that the specifics of the larger tale aren't engineered to go as far as Watson wants to take them. The book's greatest strength, alongside its palpable sense of place, is its rich period detail—including the inescapability of cigarette smoking, in which nearly every character hungrily indulges. But even the narrator's own mother, initially absorbed by the case, loses interest in it rather swiftly, so it should be no surprise that the relentless analysis of minutiae comes to feel like harping. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

Watson's novels share an elegiac tone. His melancholy narrators speak softly and sadly about the obsessions that have dominated their lives. So it is in this story of an unnamed writer whose entire career has been aimed at making sense of a tragedy that occurred in North Dakota in 1961. On that day, the father of the narrator's best friend shot a state senator and killed himself. Naturally, the question of why it happened becomes the talk of middle-class Bismarck, but it is much more than that for our narrator and his father, who discovered the body. Watson mixes the narrator's reflections on the tragedy and its effect on his later life with snippets from his short fiction, which offer various explanations for what happened. As we read, however, we realize that the real tragedy is not what happened then but what is happening now—to the narrator and to the lives he touches. The problem here is that the narrator's obsession is not the reader's, and eventually we tire of his theories. But that's the point in this oddly heartbreaking story: allowed to run amok, the past becomes a monster capable of devouring the present. Ott, Bill

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (September 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375507221
• ISBN-13: 978-0375507229
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,982,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Larry Watson was born in 1947 in Rugby, North Dakota. He grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, and was educated in its public schools. Larry married his high school sweetheart, Susan Gibbons, in 1967. He received his BA and MA from the University of North Dakota, his PhD from the creative writing program at the University of Utah, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Ripon College. Watson has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987, 2004) and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Larry Watson is the author of the novels IN A DARK TIME, MONTANA 1948, WHITE CROSSES, LAURA, ORCHARD, and SUNDOWN, YELLOW MOON; the fiction collection JUSTICE; and the chapbook of poetry LEAVING DAKOTA. Watson's fiction has been published in ten foreign editions, and has received prizes and awards from Milkweed Press, Friends of American Writers, Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association, New York Public Library, Wisconsin Library Association, Critics' Choice, and The High Plains Book Award. MONTANA 1948 was nominated for the first IMPAC Dublin international literary prize. The movie rights to MONTANA 1948 and JUSTICE have been sold to Echo Lake Productions and WHITE CROSSES and ORCHARD have been optioned for film.

He has published short stories and poems in Gettysburg Review, New England Review, North American Review, Mississippi Review, and other journals and quarterlies. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and other periodicals. His work has also been anthologized in Essays for Contemporary Culture, Imagining Home, Off the Beaten Path, Baseball and the Game of Life, The Most Wonderful Books, These United States, and Writing America.

Watson taught writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin/​Stevens Point for 25 years before joining the faculty at Marquette University in 2003 as a Visiting Professor. He has also taught and participated in writers conferences in Colorado, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Wisconsin, St. Malo and Caen, France.

Larry's latest novel, AMERICAN BOY, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2011. He and Susan live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They have two daughters, Elly and Amy, and two grandchildren, Theodore and Abigail.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I'm a HUGE Larry Watson fan..., September 18, 2007

By 

Richard Cumming "dick" (the heartland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sundown, Yellow Moon: A Novel (Hardcover)

That being said, I was not very impressed with his latest book. The first warning sign was the cover. It depicts a couple kissing. Very un-Watsonlike. Not that his characters don't kiss but it strikes me as a flagrant attempt by his publisher to expand Watson's audience by appealing to new readers who might think that this book is a romance. It's not.

Watson writes superbly about life in the desolate Dakotas. This book is set mostly in Bismarck, North Dakota, in the early 1960's. His narrator is a writer looking back 40 years to that time when his neighbor (and best friend) experienced a family tragedy. This tragic event changes the courses of several lives, including the narrator's.

Unfortunately, the narrator is not your typical Watson character. Watson has a gift for allowing us to see inside the uptight souls of windburned and stoic prairie people. The reader keeps hoping that our narrator will stop being so detached from his own passions and personal history. It doesn't happen. It is almost impossible to like this person. He doesn't inspire sympathy. He is wooden. Even when he describes moments of lust they are analytic and robotic.

At the end of the book he even admits his failure as a person to express his true feelings and how it has destroyed his relationships. It almost seems like this is Watson's way of admitting that he has blown the opportunity to satisfy us, his readers.

You can't score a touchdown on every run. Watson punts. Maybe next time.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Growing Up With Tragedy, October 29, 2007

By 

Richard S. Wheeler (Livingston, MT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sundown, Yellow Moon: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is really a coming of age novel about three high school students whose lives are deeply affected by a mysterious murder and suicide done by the father of one of them. One of those students, the narrator, is haunted by the event and seeks reasons for tragedy, along with many others in North Dakota. But this obsessive wish to understand the tragedy, if only to achieve closure, is less central to Mr. Watson's story than the impact it had on those high school students. These events largely play out in the joys and sorrows of young love. The boy whose father shot a politician and then hanged himself is permanently scarred by the tragedy, which stains everything he does thereafter, and especially his relationships with women. Larry Watson depicts these events powerfully, with heartrending tenderness as he follows the lives of his young protagonists into their middle years. Mr. Watson sensitively catches the early 60s milieu, thus framing his story in the moral and spiritual values of the those times. He is a major American novelist, one of the finest writing in these times. The sheer force and truth and honesty of his novel reaches the heart and soul of his readers.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Death in Bismarck . . ., October 22, 2007

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sundown, Yellow Moon: A Novel (Hardcover)

Fans of Larry Watson's Bentrock, Montana, stories may either be disappointed by this new novel or welcome it as an intriguing postmodern venture into the subjects of jealousy and obsession. The narrator, like the author, is a North Dakota-born writer, looking back on his coming of age in the early 1960s. A murder-suicide in the opening pages (like the double-fatality at the start of "White Crosses") sets in motion a chain of events that compromises nearly everyone it touches.

Meanwhile, unable to determine the motive for the killing, the narrator speculates through excerpts of his later literary output on versions of a love triangle, all of them fairly lurid and dispiriting - and reflecting his own unhappy love life. Watson has chosen to tell this story in the first person, which slows down its pace and largely limits its perspective to that of a callow adolescent. Altogether, it is a novel that continually teases the reader's curiosity, while holding to the more realistic proposition that human motive can hardly ever be fully known or understood. Finally all we have is fiction to come to terms with it.