Customer Reviews

The Willow Field

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

 

 

This novel does a good job with people and the rest is not as good. Fortunately, there is a lot more of it about people than anything else. The latter part of the book is much better than the front part. At a third of the way through I was going to give it two stars, the middle third gained it another star, and only memories of the beginning kept the last third from raising it to five stars.

This is the story of a boy, Rossie, and the progress of his growth as he lives out his life in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana. Rossie begins as a cowboy in Nevada and remains a horseman all his life. After he encounters Eliza, she becomes a key element of the story. A number of other people enter the story at intervals and, as is the case in life, most remain more or less connected to the end. A few of the bit players are typical westerners, but the psyches of the main characters are too unique to call typical.

Kittredge is almost an icon of Montana literature, although this is his first novel. He has filled this book with a great deal of what he has learned about Montana over decades, perhaps he includes too much. There are countless descriptions of experiences, events, and geographical features recognizable by those familiar with Montana and its history. If you are an aficionado of Montana literature, you might want to read this book with a notebook at hand and see how many allusions you recognize to other books. Some Kittredge spells out and others are subtle. One of the more obvious is the Missoula minister who is supposed to marry Rossie; his name is Dr. McLean and "they're legendary walkers and fishermen, two brothers and the father." There are probably some references that were accidental but are simply part of Kittredge's vast knowledge of the state. If this book had a bibliography, it would be at least three pages; small type.

One weakness, especially in the front part of the book, is some inaccuracies in time and space. Even a novel should be careful how it treats such things. When trailing the horse herd through Oregon on the way to Calgary, how could Steens Mountain be to the east? A little later, the description of the horse drive jumps from the entry into Montana at Monida Pass all the way to Choteau. That is a gutless thing for the writer to do; there are a lot of miles and a lot of difficulty in that gap. In addition, the timeline from the beginning of the drive until Rossie arrives back in the Flathead Valley is not credible.

One last criticism concerns three vulgar words. Remove them and the novel would be pages shorter. Westerners used such words very sparingly during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and almost never in mixed company. Their frequent usage damages the authenticity of story.

Readers of novels usually try to discern the messages or concepts the writer intends to convey. There is an interesting sentence near the back of the book: "People in Montana know what happened to the Indians, and they see that it's happening to them." Much of this book is about protecting what is wonderful about Montana from being ruined by people who don't take time to recognize those values. A connected concern is those people who move to Montana and bring along the very habits that made where they came from inferior to Montana.

William Kittredge has once again broken new ground, this time with a powerful first novel, a glorious epic of life in the American West in the early 1930s. As in his previous work, "A Hole in the Sky: A Memoir", Kittredge proves that he is a wordsmith of the first order. We are immediately involved intimately in the life of Rossie Benasco as he progresses from a "wrango boy" of 15, living horseback on the hardscrabble ranches of Nevada and California, to a well-respected man of wealth and power, an influential landowner in the starkly beautiful Bitterroot Mountains of Montana.

"The Willow Field" is full of hard lives and lives of luxury, loves and losses, Kittredge's own convictions, and perhaps most importantly of all, a panoramic view of the American West as it actually was in the setting of the early 1930s.

Definitely a marvelous read, one I found difficult to put down, and impossible to get out of my mind afterward. Kittredge has established himself firmly as a first-class novelist with this passionate book about Rossie Benasco and the Montana so beloved by them both.

In the 1930s, fifteen year old Rossie Benasco, son of the pit boss at the Riverside Casino in Reno, obtains work as a "wrango boy" at the Neversweat Ranch owned by retired rodeo star Slivers Flynn. He and his employer's daughter Mattie are attracted to one another so Slivers offers Rossie a choice. He can herd several hundred horses through Idaho and Montana to Calgary or he can marry Mattie and raise a horde of kids. Not ready for children, Rossie agrees to hit the trail.

At the end of the thousand mile journey, Rossie meets and falls in love with pregnant Scottish Eliza Stevenson. Her dad gives Rossie his Montana farm as a wedding present and soon she gives birth to a son that he adopts as his. The years go by, Rossie runs the farm and he and Eliza adopt a daughter. In December 1941 he enlists in the Marines, but is shot at home station and becomes a supply clerk. The years move on and so have their children

William Kitteredge is at his best with this homage to a bygone Americana rugged outdoors era. Readers will follow deeply Rossie's life from the 1930s as a teen through WWII on into the McCarthy period all the way up to 1991 when a "family" reunion with Mattie occurs. THE WILLOW FIELD is a superb slice of twentieth century Americana.

Harriet Klausner

i , too, began this book expecting something similar to All The Pretty Horses. and the 1st few chapters seemed headed in that direction. then rossie meets eliza's parents, and the whole feel of the novel changes.

just go with it, though. sometimes its good not to get what you THOUGHT you wanted. the storyline is good enough to keep you moving along, even when you kinda start scratching your head at the ambiguous prose and unexpected direction changes.

also, i really came to love all the charecters in this book. everyone is so uniquely created and molded, and its cool how rossie's family unit shapes and re-shapes itself.

in closing, this is a very good piece of fiction. i believe most who pick it up will enjoy it.

Kittredge is a fine short story writer; one of the best. Read to page 74 of this novel and you will be entertained by a fine story, well told, about a young man signing on with a horse drive from northern California to Calgary. Set in the worst years of the Depression, it calls to mind an era when America and the American West were a very different place from what they are today.

You can put the book down at that point because what follows is a long meandering search for any further illumination of the subjects it has raised. Most frustrating are the characters' impulsiveness and lack of apparent motivation or the need to explain themselves. When they talk, they talk at each other, preferring irony to revealing what they actually think or feel. Since the central character, Rossie, seems only to follow the path of least resistance, trusting to luck, his actions are chiefly determined by his libido - and there are plenty of scenes of how that plays out. But it's a life that remains unexamined - either by Rossie himself or by Kittredge.

I hung on until half-way through the novel and finally jumped to the end, where I found nothing that gave me the idea I'd missed anything. The characters were still opaque and unreflective, still drinking and engaged in bantering, aimless conversations. I've never posted a review here for a book that I haven't read cover to cover, and I hesitate doing that this time. But Kittredge fans and any reader preferring depth of character, a strong story line, a vivid portrayal of history or geography, or any one of the above, should know that they may find this novel less than absorbing.

I was expecting something along the lines of All the Pretty Horses. What I got was one of those stories kids make up on the spur of the moment when they're playing cowboys and indians outside or when they're imagining themselves playing in a big baseball game and hitting a game-winning home run -- "The crowd roars as I cross home plate!" Wow, was this storyline loose, free to introduce anything at anytime. None of the characters are particularly endearing, especially the main character. Kittredge is an accomplished wordsmith, but he's established himself for me as no more than a second-rate pulp fiction writer, albeit one with an obvious appreciation of the "wonders" of the West.

I stuck with, before abandoning until the ending, the pretentious, overwrought dialog only because I was sick in bed with nothing else to read. Kittredge honed this novel to be a work of craftsmanship, and he gets A for effort and the 2nd star for this rating, which would otherwise be one star. But the novel is top-heavy and cumbersome to follow after the cattle drive.

The Willow Field is so titled, one presumes, because that place represents a time and space of innocence and the foreboding of its loss. But innocence is everywhere undermined by the cynical, self-absorbed characters who all speak in the same voice. Even our Cowboy, when his co-optation was complete, turns into one of the insipid high society bores.

The novel is also not an accurate depiction of people, especially women, in 1933; nor of sexuality (overplayed renditions of "cock" and not one mention of clitoris); nor of horses and horsemanship, which, as a horseman, is my raison de lire for Westerns. In one place the author equates "colt" to "baby mare." A colt is a male; a baby mare is a filly; either could be a foal. A minor point, perhaps, but it tends to disqualify much else Kittredge says about horses and, as others have pointed out, about geography.

Now that I am over my cold, I will hasten a return to the real masters of this genre--Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey, Elmer Kelton, and JPS Brown.

I am an avid reader of of both non-fiction and fiction works about the American West and was really looking forward to this novel. However, I absolutely hated it. I could not relate to most of the characters, especially Eliza and Rossie. I have spent many years traveling throughout Montana, western Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, etc. Mr. Kittredge's geographical mistakes were extremely annoying.

Imagine the best book you've ever read. Then double it. Then double it again. Captivating characters, wide and stunning imagery, great story, and of course the craftwork of a master. C''mon Kittredge, give us another.