American Boy
Larry Watson, 2011
Milkweed Editions
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781571310781
Summary
We were exposed to these phenomena in order that we might learn something, but of course the lessons we learn are not always what was intended.
So begins Matthew Garth’s story of the fall of 1962, when the shooting of a young woman on Thanksgiving Day sets off a chain of unsettling events in small-town Willow Falls, Minnesota. Matthew first sees Louisa Lindahl in Dr. Dunbar’s home office, and at the time her bullet wound makes nearly as strong an impression as her unclothed body. Fueled over the following weeks by his feverish desire for this mysterious woman and a deep longing for the comfort and affluence that appears to surround the Dunbars, Matthew finds himself drawn into a vortex of greed, manipulation, and ultimately betrayal.
Immersive, heart-breaking, and richly evocative of a time and place, this long-awaited novel marks the return of a great American storyteller. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1947
• Raised—Bismark, North Dakota, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F.A., Unversity of North Dakota; Ph.D.,
University of Utah
• Awards—Milkweed National Fiction Prize, Mountains and
Plains Bookseller Award, Friends of American Writers
Award, Banta Award, Critics Choice Award, ALA/YALSA
Best Books for Young Adults Winner
• Currently—lives in Milwaukee, Wisoconsin
Larry Watson was born in 1947 in Rugby, North Dakota. He grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, and married his high school sweetheart. He received his BA and MFA from the University of North Dakota, his Ph.D. 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.
Watson is the author of five novels and a chapbook of poetry. His fiction has been published in more than 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, and Critics’ Choice. 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 has 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, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, 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. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Graceful shifts from observation to insight, capturing the spare beauty of the landscape.
New York Times Book Review
Filled with rugged prose sometimes as biting as a northern plains wind, the next page is as inviting and lyrical as a well-stoked stove. Watson writes of people universal in their flaws and virtues, a community hat cannot be defined or limited to one region or genre.
Washington Post Book World
There’s something eminently universal in Watson’s ponderings on the human condition, and it’s refracted through a nearly perfect eye for character, place, and the rhythms of language.
The Nation
[Watson] spins charm and melancholy around the same fingers, the result a soft but urgent rendering of a young man coming of age in rural America that is recognizable to even those of us who were never there.
Denver Post
Watson will] harvest a bumper crop of readers this autumn.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Watson is sure-footed on familiar ground in American Boy.... [He’s] made something of a specialty of that space where teenagers struggle between hormonal urges and moral decisions as they grope toward adulthood. His evocation of that difficult passage feels as sure as his evocation of small-town life in the upper Midwest more than one generation ago... As convincing as it is lonely and bleak.
Billings Gazette
Watson’s new novel about a young man’s coming-of-age in rural Minnesota during the early ’60s never veers off course.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Watson has penned some of the best contemporary fiction about small-town America, and his new novel does not disappoint.... With his graceful writing style, well-drawn characters, and subtly moving plot, Watson masterfully portrays the dark side of small-town America. Highly readable and enthusiastically recommended.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Eighteen years ago, Milkweed published Watson’s breakthrough novel, Montana 1948; now the author returns to Milkweed with another powerful coming-of-age story about a teenage boy [Matthew Garth] being shocked into maturity by a moment of sudden and unexpected violence.... Like Holden Caulfield trying to catch innocent children before they fall off the cliff adjoining that field of rye, Matthew struggles to save the Dunbars and, in so doing, save himself. He fails, of course, but that’s the point of much of Watson’s always melancholic, always morally ambiguous fiction: coming-of-age is about failure as much as it is about growth.
Booklist
Watson's sixth novel resonates with language as clear and images as crisp as the spare, flat prairie of its Minnesota setting.... A vivid story of sexual tension, family loyalty and betrayal.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How does Matthew’s position as an outsider affect his description of events? Does this identity, along with his age at the time of the novel's events, make him reliable or unreliable as a narrator?
2. Dr. Dunbar is portrayed as a character of contrasts. Townspeople are divided in their opinion on him, and Matthew frequently encounters characteristics of Dr. Dunbar’s that oppose each other. Is one the true Dr. Dunbar?
3. Does Dr. Dunbar step outside the lines of professional ethics by taking the boys under his wing in his medical career?
4. Matthew identifies with the mythological figure Antaeus, comparing his own need for involvement with the Dunbars to Antaeus’s need for contact with the earth. What does this convey about Matthew’s self-image?
5. Matthew describes his attraction to Louisa by saying it was “too soon to call it love and too simple to call it lust, but I felt something powerful…” Where do his feelings rate on a scale between a schoolboy crush and mature love? Is it possible to rate the affections that one experiences in youth?
6. Matthew only briefly describes his father. How does this view contrast to his relationship with Dr. Dunbar? Is Dr. Dunbar truly a father figure to Matthew? Does Dunbar’s abandonment at the end of the novel negate the fathering and counseling that he did previously?
7. How are mothers portrayed in this novel? Think of the quiet and powerless Mrs. Dunbar, the laissez-faire Mrs. Garth, the non-existent mother of the young Louisa, and the seductive Mrs. Knurr.
(Questions issued by publisher.)