English Creek
Ivan Doig, 1984
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743271271
Summary
This novel wa written first as part of Doig's McCaskill Trilogy—Dancing at the Rascal Fair and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana—but read Rascal Fair first, then English Creek.
The days of arriving summer, the rangeland green at last across northern Montana, the hundred-mile horizon of the Rocky Mountains, form the backdrop for Jick McCaskill's coming-of-age late in the Depression.
Jick is fourteen and able now to share in the full life of family and town and ranch in the sprawling Two Medicine country. His father is a roustabout range rider turned forest ranger; his mother, from a local ranching family, is a practical woman with a peppery wit. His idolized brother Alec is eighteen and strong-minded, set on marriage to a town girl and on a livelihood as a cowboy. Alec's choice of "cow chousing" throws the McCaskills into conflict, and through Jick's eyes we see a family at a turning point—"where all four of our lives made their bend."
The course of the book follows the events of the Two Medicine country's summer, a season of humor and escapade as well as drama. Jick accompanies his father on a horseback journey to count sheep onto Mountain rangeland allotted by the national forest—a routine yearly duty that leads to the revelation of a long-kept family secret.
The Fourth of July, a time of rodeo and picnic and all-night square dance, is the summer's social zenith, brought to life by Jick's journey from innocence. But it is an end-of-August forest fire that brings the book, as well as the McCaskill family's struggle within itself, to a stunning climax. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1939
• Where—White Sulphur Springs, Montana, USA
• Death—April 9, 2015
• Where—Seattle, Washington
• Education—B.A., M.A., Northwestern University; Ph.D., University of Washington
Ivan Doig was born in Montana to a family of home-steaders and ranch hands. After the death of his mother Berneta, on his sixth birthday, he was raised by his father Charles "Charlie" Doig and his grandmother Elizabeth "Bessie" Ringer. After several stints on ranches, they moved to Dupuyer, Pondera County, Montana in the north to herd sheep close to the Rocky Mountain front.
After his graduation from Valier high school, Doig attended Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in journalism. He later earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Washington, writing his dissertation about John J. McGilvra (1827-1903). He now lives with his wife Carol Doig, nee Muller, a university professor of English, in Seattle, Washington.
Before he became a novelist, Doig wrote for newspapers and magazines as a free-lancer and worked for the United States Forest Service. He has also published two memoirs—This House of Sky (1979) and Heart Earth (1993).
Much of his fiction (more than 10 novels) is set in the Montana country of his youth. His major theme is family life in the past, mixing personal memory and regional history. As the western landscape and people play an important role in his fiction, he has been hailed as the new dean of western literature, a worthy successor to Wallace Stegner. (From Wikipedia.)
Extras
His own words:
• Taking apart a career in such summary sentences always seems to me like dissecting a frog—some of the life inevitably goes out of it—and so I think the more pertinent Ivan Doig for you, Reader, is the red-headed only child, son of ranch hand Charlie Doig and ranch cook Berneta Ringer Doig (who died of her lifelong asthma on my sixth birthday), who in his junior year of high school (Valier, Montana; my class of 1957 had 21 members) made up his mind to be a writer of some kind.
• No one is likely to confuse my writing style with that of Charlotte Bronte, but when that impassioned parson’s daughter lifted her pen from Jane Eyre and bequeathed us the most intriguing of plot summaries—"Reader, I married him"—she also was subliminally saying what any novelist ... must croon to those of you with your eyes on our pages: "Reader, my story is flirting with you; please love it back."
• One last word about the setting of my work, the American West. I don’t think of myself as a "Western" writer. To me, language—the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose—is the ultimate "region," the true home, for a writer. Specific geographies, but galaxies of imaginative expression —we’ve seen them both exist in William Faulkner’s postage stamp-size Yoknapatawpha County, and in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s nowhere village of Macondo, dreaming in its hundred years of solitude. If I have any creed that I wish you as readers, necessary accomplices in this flirtatious ceremony of writing and reading, will take with you from my pages, it’d be this belief of mine that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Commonly compared with Paul Horgan and Wallace Stegner...Doig seems something else. A truer comparison might be with Robert Louis Stevenson because of Doig's magical welding of history into fiction, of adventure with everyday life, of legend with lore.
Washington Post
Here is the real Montana, the real West, through the eyes of a real writer.
Wallace Stegner
Sheer magic...simply a national treasure.
USA Today
The summer of his 14th year brings challenges and changes to Jick McCaskill and his family, in this book which echoes with the pioneering and human spirit.... Jick's older brother decides not to attend college, becoming a cowboy instead; a fire in Two Medicine National Forest threatens to destroy the community; and, by summer's end, Jick has learned the secret his father and an old campjack have kept from the rest of the community.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Much of the success of English Creek stems from the credibility of the narrative voice. Show how Jick McCaskill's acute sensitivity and observant personality make him a prime candidate for creating a balanced narrative structure. How does Doig artistically meld Jick's psychological musings with his more historical accounts?
2. The novel is in great part about Jick's journey into maturity, into wisdom. How does Jick bridge the gap between boyhood and manhood? Who is particularly influential in his coming of age?
3. Laconicism is a common characteristic of the ranchers and mountain-men in Western film and fiction. Jick inherits his father's wry wit; show how he uses it to deal with life's bitter situations.
4. Is Alec a foil to Jick? Are there key choices that Alec makes and particular events in his life that save him from being a flat character and make him, rather, someone worth serious consideration?
5. At the end of Chapter One, Jick says, "Skinning wet sheep corpses, contending with a pack horse who decides he's a mountain goat, nursing Stanley along, lightning, any number of self-cooked meals, the hangover I'd woke up with and still had more than a trace of—what sad sonofabitch wouldn't realize he was being used out of the ordinary?" Jick's pack trip with Stanley Meixell is a jolting thrust from innocence to experience. What prompts Jick to discard his first impressions of Stanley and delve deeper into the meaning of the man behind Dr. Al K. Hall?
6. Why is Beth eager to avoid looking back? Compare and contrast Jick's attitude toward the past and its stories with his mother's attitude. Do the deaths of Varick and Alec rattle Beth into retrospective musings, even regret about what might have been?
7. Discuss how the Double W embodies the characteristics of the classic villain of the West.
8. Consider Velma Simms and Leona Tracy and how Doig paints their entrance into a room full of males. Compare and contrast the adoration they receive with the more quiet acknowledgement Beth receives from the men who love her. Why is Leona so alluring to Alec, even Jick? Is her highly physical role in the novel, a role charged with sexual tension, somehow comparable to the role of Cather's Lena Lingard in My Antonia?
9. The 4th of July dance adds mystery and musicality to the novel. Discuss the imagery surrounding this "beautiful haunting" and how the scene helps Jick to see his parents in a way that illuminates "all that had begun at another dance, at the Noon Creek schoolhouse 20 years before."
10. Why does Varick McCaskill listen to Stanley's advice about the fire in Flume Gulch? Were Jick not "prey to a profound preoccupation," would the novel have turned out the way that it does?
11. Doig recognizes the danger of engaging in literary symbolism at the risk of adding pretense to a novel that aims to be more realistic. What literary devices does he use instead to enliven both the narrative and his characters' voices? Do you think the inclusion of these devices, particularly song lyrics, is Doig's attempt at a fusion of poetry and fiction?
(Questions courtesy of the author's website.)