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Introduction: Ivan Doig's Ride With Me, Mariah Montana
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19034 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1991 |
383 Words |
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In Ride with Me, Mariah Montana, excerpted in the following pages, widower Jick McCaskill reaches a psychological juncture as important to him as the continental divide is to the state of Montana. Speaking to a crowd of fellow Montanans celebrating the state's first centennial, Jick attempts to recount the peaks and valleys of the state's history, the good and the bad, with compassion but without sentimentality. Equally important, in frequent introspective asides, he tries to make sense of his own life at that particular moment: the demise of his ranch, the failed marriage of his beloved daughter, the death of his wife, and the prospect of his remarriage to a woman he's known since high school. Life hasn't turned out the way Jick planned it, but if he and Montana can keep up with changing times, it might turn out all right in the end.
Since Mariah Montana is the concluding volume of a trilogy begun nine years ago, it also may mark a turning point for Seattle based author Ivan Doig. Few western writers today are as closely watched or admired as he is for blending western myth, history, and modern reality in the stories of men and women who remain perfectly recognizable individuals.
But what is the achievement of Mariah Montana, and how significant is the trilogy in the context of modern western writing? Book critic Chilton Williamson, Jr., and literary scholar Carl Bredahl attempt to answer those questions in commentaries following the excerpt. Williamson notes that in the span of the trilogy the state of Montana passes from a premodern society to a postmodern one without having acquired historical depth in the process--a great theme with strong potential but never realized poetically in the text. Nonetheless, as Bredahl points
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