Fencing the Sky [BARGAIN PRICE] (Hardcover)

by James Galvin (Author) "SOMEONE LEFT A GATE OPEN and a few of Mike's cows strayed out..." (more)
Key Phrases: cattle guard, Potatoes Browning, Sand Creek, Medicine Bow (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
James Galvin opens his first novel with a shocking, seemingly inexplicable murder--horseman Mike Arans closes on a pistol-packing motorist named Merriwether Snipes, throws a rope and snaps his neck--and then proceeds to illuminate why it happened, what it means, and how Mike deals with the consequences. Though billed as a novel, Fencing the Sky is in fact a more deeply fictionalized continuation of The Meadow, Galvin's partly historic, partly imagined evocation of a way of life that took hold on an upland Wyoming ranch for a century and then blew away.

If The Meadow is elegiac, Fencing the Sky is angry and blackly humorous. This is the grim, greedy '90s, when swaggering developers like Merriwether Snipes ride the range in their ATV's, carving up the old homesteads into 40-acre ranchettes and making life hell for the few decent people who remain. Galvin makes three of these holdouts his heroes--Oscar Rose, who supports a cattle habit (and family) by working as a vet; Adkisson Trent, a doctor who inherited from his father a spectacular spread and a penchant for proud solitude; and Arans, the renegade, who fled from New Jersey to become a cowboy. The heat of the book rises from the connections and passions of these men--their women and work troubles, their unspoken bond with each other, their fury at Snipes and everything he represents.

Galvin, a poet, has assembled his narrative out of vivid shards, yet, despite the jump-cuts, this is an old-fashioned novel at heart, with heroes and villains, heartbreak and suspense, and characters so real you want to ride out and shake hands. The same themes, the same imagery, the same equine adoration crop up in Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, but Galvin has a lighter touch, eschewing myth for the minute particulars of hard work and hard luck in a single community. Galvin can also crack a good joke, even though he knows as well as anyone that there's not a lot to laugh about under the big sky these days. --David Laskin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
True to form, this post-Cormac McCarthy western by first-time novelist, poet and nonfiction writer (The Meadow) Galvin is heavy on biblical cadences, macho philosophy and metaphor. Land developer Merriweather Snipes likes to harass cattle in his off-road vehicle, and when he is murdered in the act, lassoed around the neck by cattle owner Mike Arans, none of his Larimer County, Colo., neighbors mourns his death. By selling acreage that used to be ranch land to suburbanites looking for country homes, Snipes had already made himself extremely unpopular with the recently widowed Mike , Mike's neighbor Oscar Rose and Snipes's own neighbor Doctor Adkisson Trent. The disrespectful newcomers bring with them traffic, ignorance of water and range use, and hoodlum children. So Snipes's murder is considered more of a lucky accident by the county's original inhabitants, who help Mike escape. The story follows a double track. On one side it trails Mike as he slips down paths in the National Forest, pursued by Apache tracker and Vietnam vet Jim Thomas. Alternately, Galvin provides a series of micro-histories of the decline of ranching culture, as exemplified in the lives of Ad and Oscar, who are native to the country, and Mike, who migrated as a hippie refugee in the '70s. Galvin's prose tries for some combination of the laconic and the sublime, but too often devolves into such imprecise lyricism as "His laugh was like a school bus, big, capricious, bright." Still, the patchwork quality of the narrative serves the story well, and the author's vision of a new American West populated by a motley collection of old-timers and newcomers rings true. In its more relaxed moments, the novel gives readers a worthwhile glimpse of the small-scale rancher's endangered world. Regional author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 258 pages
• ISBN-10: 0805062203
• ASIN: B000F7BPCK
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,183,801 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jim has captured the guts of the land of which he writes., November 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Fencing the Sky: A Novel (Hardcover)

My parents live on 5 of those 40 acre parcels about which Mr. Galvin has so beautifully written, 200 acres that they have put their own touch upon. He has realistically portrayed the spirit of the people whose history has been undermined by development. Those who have encroached on this desolate place were also truthfully portrayed. It's a sad legacy that we all have to hand our children, my own included. I very much enjoyed this book, not only because I could intimately relate to the area, but because it was wonderfully, believably written. Mr. Galvin has the ability to convince a reader that they are within the story, with all senses experiencing the moment.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fugitive Cowboy On The Run in Wyoming, March 17, 2005

By	D. Spears - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Fencing the Sky: A Novel (Paperback)

This is one of a number of modern Westerns I read in the winter of 2004-05. The others included: J. Robert Lennon's, "On The Night Plain," Annie Proulx' "Close Range"; Mark Spragg's "Fruit Of Stone", Ralph Beer's "The Blind Corral"; Gretel Ehrlich's "Heart Mountain", and David Long's "Blue Spruce", a collection of modern stories. I might also include Wallace Stegner's "Angle Of Repose" which is more of a historical Western though with more contemporary aspects, John Treadwell Nichols' "The New Mexico Trilogy",which seems to me now somewhat dated, or Rick De Marinis' "Year Of The Zinc Penny", set mostly in wartime L.A. in 1943 but about a family with Montana roots. If you only have time to read one--since they are somewhat repetitive, particularly in the areas of cattle or sheep ranching, horsemanship and descriptions of ranch life-- you might choose "Fencing The Sky" since it is one of the best, with Beer's great rather nostalgic novel perhaps second. This is a society in which tradition lasts longer than in some other areas of the country, certainly dating from the late 19th century.

All these novels & stories lament the passing of the Old West, but some--certainly "Fencing The Sky" and "Angle Of Repose" are also strikingly contemporary, dealing with such issues as 60's student radicalism,war service (Lennon, Beer, and Ehrlich) aggressive land development, and considerable ecological problems such as deforestation and strip mining which have laid waste to this part of the country, as Jared Diamond's recent book "Collapse" also attests. Elk and elk hunting, and other naturalistic descriptions, are another subject common to all. At least three of the novels contain quite a lot of romance between siblings growing up on neighboring ranches in what will seem to some, including myself,to be a rather idyllic life, certainly the opposite of urban living.Some of the ranch details are truly inspired, such as a pack rat stealing from a cowboy in the middle of the night, or a square dance. Proulx' amazing award-winning stories are packed with historic details, in a limited space. Cowboys are unfortunately somewhat prone to alcoholism, also. Both Spragg and Galvin use a flashback technique in alternating chapters. Each novel is somewhat unique so that you can enjoy each but all have a great deal in common as well. Spragg's novel is most uniquely notable for its humour--a wayward wife,two old friends, an Indian, a dog, a physicist, and their misadventures.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic vision of the passing West, December 13, 2002

By	Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Fencing the Sky: A Novel (Hardcover)

James Galvin is a poet, and his vision of the people who inhabit the land where this story takes place is also poetic. Instead of a straightforward narrative from beginning to middle to end, it intermingles scenes from the lives of several characters told in flashbacks and flashforwards, all sequenced along the spine of a single plot line that involves the pursuit of a fugitive who has killed another man.

The location is northern Colorado and parts of Wyoming extending through the Great Divide Basin and northward into the mountains. The main characters are men with ties to the land -- a rancher, a cowboy, a doctor. Each is witness in his own way to the passing of the rural West and its replacement by land developers and the mining and logging industries.

They are also remnants of a code of honor that respects hard work, the individual, the land and its wildlife, and the values of courage, loyalty, and generosity. In particular, Galvin captures the nuances of friendship between these very individual men and the way matters of concern to them are often lightened with ironic and self-deprecating humor. I enjoyed this book and found myself caring very much for the welfare of its fugitive protagonist.

I recommend this novel to anyone with an interest in the modern West. As a companion book, I'd also recommend Frank Clifford's nonfiction book "Backbone of the World: A Portrait of a Vanishing Way of Life Along the Continental Divide," which finds many of the same kinds of people from real life and explores in greater depth many of the land use issues raised by Galvin's book. As of this writing, "Fencing the Sky" seems to be going out of print. I'm hoping that it reappears shortly in paperback and has a new life for new readers in that format.