Customer Reviews

Sundown, Yellow Moon: A Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The structure of this story is in the first person with our narrator who is a writer looking back over forty years. He searches his memory for a solution to a 40 year old crime. The year of focus here is 1962 and our narrator is graduating from high school. (I also graduated in 1962.) Down the block his best friend's father has hung himself in the garage shortly after assassinating a State Senator. All this takes place in Bismarck, North Dakota. The winding road of the story, like all of Larry Watson's work, is really built around this suicide as a devise to hook the reader. And it does, at least it did me. Although I much preferred Watson's classic MONTANA 1948 and his WHITE CROSSES I found YELLOW MOON to be a worthwhile and interesting diversion. I am not sure Watson's devise of adding the narrator's own fiction as an aside in most chapters worked for me. It appeared to slow down the narrative of the story. Otherwise this could have been a real page turner. Without going more into the plot let me leave it to say that our young narrator falls in love in a very convincing way and that relationship's impact and his obsession with the idea of it has resonated within him for over forty years. I'm sure this is a story and group of characters that will remain with me for some time. As an aside this subject and story reminded me of another similar story and thus gives me a chance to mention a book which given to me for Christmas in 1960, A SENSE OF VALUES, by Sloan Wilson. You may know Wilson as the author of THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT and SUMMER PLACE. In VALUES Wilson's has his narrator looking back over his life finding he has achieved success while suffering great personal failure. That book had a great impact on me. I doubt it is even sure it is in print today but if you can find it, or any of his other books by Sloan Wilson I would recommend them to you. (Also, if you have a chance check out the audio book of Montana 1948 read by Bo Bridges. It is quite extraordinary.)

As with his previous novels, Watson takes life events - sometimes small, though in this case, one quite large in scope - and explores it from all angles. One act is seen as it affects different characters. And, because Watson draws his characters so well, it was almost a little disappointing not to find out what happened to all the participants. It's almost as if this was a non-fiction depiction of a real event. these people are "real" and we want to find out what happened to them!

Well worth reading.

The entire novel rests on the supposition that the reader is as inordinately and as obsessively interested in examining endless and multiple explanations for the shooting of a local senator, Monty Burnham, of Bismarck, North Dakota, by Raymond Stoddard, who commits suicide after the murder, as is the narrator. When the novel opens the narrator and Raymond's son Gene are 16 year-old best friends who reside on the infamous Keogh Street, and they are the last two people to see Raymond alive. This murder-suicide scenario is a credibly searing memory for the narrator and it serves to define his identity for the rest of the novel. All those connected to the Burnhams or the Stoddards offer their own unique explanations for what motivated Raymond Stoddard to pull that trigger and subsequently take his own life.
Gene and the narrator are both in love with Marie and this serves as a subplot of sorts. By the 308th page, I can only say that I really didn't much care why Raymond shot Monty, and I believe it was too flimsy a mystery on which to base an entire plot. Solving the mystery seems to become the narrator's raison d'etre, and this just doesn't seem to ring true for me. I highly recommend Montana 1948 to see Watson at his very best.

I purchased a used book. I bought 3 at the same time, all used paperbacks and by the same author.I feel that this one was in poor condition. I also paid 3 separate shipping charges. Couldn't they all have been shipped together?