Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
Ivan Doig, 1990
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743271264
Summary
Third in Doig's "McCaskill" Trilogy—Dancing at the Rascal Fair and English Creek (but read Rascal Fair first).
"We are a family that can be kind of stiffbacked," Jick McCaskill reflects with a characteristic sense of life's complications as he narrates this final novel of the "McCaskell" Trilogy.
In English Creek Ivan Doig gave us the West of the l930's; in Dancing at the Rascal Fair, the alluring Rocky Mountain frontier of the late nineteenth century. Now, by way of Jick again and another cast of ineffably believable characters, he brings the story forward to l989, Montana's centennial summer.
Jick, facing age and loss, is jump-started back into adventure and escapade by his red-headed and headlong daughter Mariah, a newspaper photographer: "Pack your socks and come along with me on this," she directs. The grand tour she has in mind is centenary Montana by Winnebago, but the drawback is the reporter assigned with her, restless-minded Riley Wright. "Listen, petunia," says Jick, "I don't even want to be in the same vicinity as that Missoula whistledick, let alone go chasing around the whole state of Montana with him."
But chase around they do, in beguiling encounters with the American road and all the rewards and travails this can bring—among them, a charging buffalo, a senior citizens' used car caravan, astounding bartenders, obtuse admonitions from the home office, and blazing arguments (and a surprising alliance of convenience) between Mariah and Riley.
And just as the centennial is a cause for reflection as well as jubilation, the exuberant travels of this trio bring on "memory storms" that become occasions for reassessment and necessary accommodations of the heart. (From the author's website.)
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
An extravagant celebration filled with devotion, and with passion for its locale, its people, and their history.
Washington Post
Spiced with Doig's inimitable dialogue and colorful characters, Ride with Me, Mariah Montana preserves a cherished bit of America's landscape and history for all of us.
USA Today
Spurred by the 1989 centennial of Montana's statehood, moody widower Jick McCaskill, turning 65, criss-crosses the state in a Winnebago with his photographer daughter, strong-willed, feisty Mariah, and her ex-husband, Riley, a reporter. In this crowning volume of a trilogy, which includes English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair, Doig again displays a masterly skill in depicting the American West which few writers match. Instead of patriotic hoopla, the canvas is dotted with failing ranches, oil pumps clanking away in farmed fields, Montanans tensely poised between an uncertain future and a frontier past. Jick, who narrates this road story with brash humor, faces two emotional crises: Mariah precipitously announces plans to remarry Riley; and Leona, Riley's mother, who once had an ill-fated fling with Jick's dead brother, joins the caravan. This entertaining ramble adroitly blends travelogue, family drama, history and newspaper lore
Publishers Weekly
To explore the meaning of Montana's century of statehood, 65-year-old Jick McCaskill, his photographer daughter Mariah, and her newspaper columnist ex-husband Riley Wright tour the Treasure State in Jick's Winnebago. While Riley writes on-the-scene dispatches and Mariah takes photos of the places they visit, Jick, the narrator, recounts the state's—and his family's—good and bad times. A lengthy picaresque with innumerable well-crafted vignettes, this leisurely novel could easily serve as a tour guide of Montana's historic places. As the miles go by, Riley and Mariah again fall in and out of love, and Jick, a widower, unexpectedly finds a new mate. The culminating volume in the McCaskill trilogy, which includes English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), is highly recommended for its depiction of the past's impact on the present. —James B. Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Llb., Alamosa, Col.
Library Journal
A casually artful and triumphant end to Doig's trilogy.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At one point in Ride with Me, Mariah Montana, Jick muses, "Everything of life picture-size, neatly edged. Wouldn't that be handy, if but true." In one sense, Doig does tie the lives of his characters to the art of photography. Explore the ocular imagery in the novel, particularly as related to Jick and Mariah. How much of the novel is about learning to readjust your eyes to new light?
2. Why is the newspaper business, a vagrant occupation reliant on waves of inspiration, so appealing to Mariah and Riley? Study the articles in the Centennial series and compare/contrast how Mariah with her camera and Riley with his pen respond to the challenge of portraying the West. Why do they steer away from romanticizing the "wistful little town off the beaten path" in their depiction of Montana?
3. Jick remarks that the buttes arising from the heart of Montana's earth are "lone sentinel forms the eye seeks." Why does the eye seek them? How do they inform Jick's invisible landscape, and to what extent is the ranch (also a kind of sentinel) a part of Jick's mental dwelling place?
4. Doig, through the persona of Riley, flexes his storytelling muscles when describing the Baloney Express. Riley writes, "They have seen the majority of Montana's century, each of these seven men old in everything but their restlessness, and as their carefully strewn line of taillights burns a route into the night their stories ember through the decades." Discuss the significance of the encounter with these colorful old men and how their tales prove to be a turning point in the Centennial series.
5. Having read his ancestors' letters with surprise and sorrow, Jick becomes acutely vulnerable. He reflects about Mariah and Riley, "Let history whistle through their ears all it wanted. Mine were ready for a rest." Why does Jick resist reminiscence?
6. Compare the scene at the Nez Perce gravesite with the scene at the gravesite where Alex is buried. Which is harder for Jick to bear—the recollection of his own experience at war or his recollection of the "battle" Alec waged with his family?
7. At the height of his depression, Jick wryly regrets, "People do end up this way, alone in a mobile home of one sort or another, their remaining self shrunken to fit into a metal box." After an exasperated cry for help to his late wife, where, then, does Jick turn? What events, people and thoughts lead him out of his sense of abandonment and urge him to grasp at life with both vigor and calm resolve?
8. In "East of Crazy," Doig describes the wind with subtle imagery. How does the image of the Chinook complement the plot of Mariah and Riley venturing into a questionable second relationship?
9. Jick sums up Riley's character as "the king who never forgot anything but never learned anything either". Explain why Mariah is initially willing to overlook Riley's impenetrable hard-headedness and re-enter a marriage with him. Does Doig lead us to side with Mariah in her final decision?
10. What effect does Leona's revelation of the events leading to her breakup with Alec have on Jick? Could we attribute his subsequent, even stronger desire for her to the fact that he, too, has felt her "dry sorrow beyond tears," and finds consolation in knowing she can relate to his sense of loss. How does this feeling of loss both include and transcend the loss of Alec?
11. In his stories and memoirs, Doig depicts the historic struggle to keep Montana's working ranches alive. Contrast Riley's cynical attitude toward the fate of the Montana ranch with Jick's initial idealism about his own sheep ranch. How does Jick come to terms with the reality of losing what he had worked so hard for?
12. As he did in English Creek, Doig incorporates a dancing scene and a moving speech at the end of Ride with Me, Mariah Montana to frame the emotional development of his characters, Jick and Mariah. Discuss how the style of writing in these passages elevates the reader's attitude toward Jick as father and as rancher and Mariah as daughter and photographer.
(Questions courtesy of the author's website.)
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