Once again, Larry Watson returns to the inscrutabilities of the past to try to puzzle out how his characters got where they did. And once again he boldly – and generally successfully – uses an unusual device to tell his story.
In his previous novel, “Orchard,” several years of events are framed within one day in which one character sneaks up on the house of another. In “Sundown, Yellow Moon” – the title is from a Bob Dylan song – he relates chunks of his tale via fiction-within-fiction. The unnamed narrator, a fiction writer and teacher, has rendered his speculations about a murder-suicide from his boyhood into short stories published in literary quarterlies.
And, while “Orchard” was set in the author’s adopted state of Wisconsin, in “Sundown, Yellow Moon” we once again are in familiar Watson territory, his native North Dakota, specifically, the North Dakota of decades past.
In Bismarck in 1961, when the narrator was in high school, Ray Stoddard, the father of his best friend, Gene, shot and killed a state senator, Monty Burnham, and then hanged himself. The central question is, Why? As the narrator says, “(I)n spite of the popularity of mystery novels, is who the question we really want answered? Isn’t why what we really want to know?”
Was it jealous rage over Ray’s suspicions that his wife, Alma, was carrying on with Monty? Or was Ray involved in soon-to-be-exposed political-financial corruption with Monty? Was it festering anger over Monty’s long-ago swindle of Ray’s father? Or was Ray simply mentally unstable?
The narrator looks for clues to Ray’s identity as a murderer, an identity he is sure must have been within him long before he committed the acts. He says, “I’ve always felt that my early attempts to imagine my way into the real Raymond Stoddard’s mind … disposed me to create fictions more concerned with the motives behind actions than with the actions themselves.”
In those fictions, sex, that old devil, repeatedly raises its head. In one, set during World War II, Monty has sex with Alma in the bathroom of a Texas hotel room while a drunken Ray sleeps on the bed nearby.
In another story, Monty, who is Ray’s superior officer in an Army outfit overseas, confesses his cuckoldry to Ray. In yet another, set in high school class reunions in 1951 and 1961, Ray suspects that Alma has sex with Monty and, 10 years later, thinks of killing Monty.
We never know whether any of the speculations are correct. We know only what the narrator knows – that the fatal acts caused a poisoning of the three- way relationship connecting him, Gene and the girl they both loved, Marie Ryan.
At one point Marie fears that Gene may be bent on following his father in suicide, and the narrator cannot suppress the thought that Gene’s suicide would give him a clear field with her.
Though the short stories are set off in italics, their interspersing with the regular narrative can at times become mildly confusing: Are we in the “real” story of the events in which the narrator is, as a boy and young man, a chief actor? Or have we shifted to one of his short stories about them?
Watson’s lean style – established in his early and best-known novel, “Montana 1948” – while still stingy in metaphor and imagery, here feels a bit fuller, richer. Moreover, his characters, as always, feel “realer” than those of just about any contemporary novelist I am familiar with.
Most novelists, no matter how honestly they attempt to draw their characters, also seem unable to resist giving them more lovable quirks, witty wisecracks or appalling oddities than are found in the common run of humankind. This makes them interesting, but also less like ordinary people. Watson’s people are like the people you know.
The questions the novel raises, such as about the narrator’s inextinguishable yearning for Marie and his ultimate loss of her, are not unanswered so much as they are given a dozen possible answers. In the foreign country of the past, they may do things differently, but they do not tell us how.
“Sundown, Yellow Moon” is, not least of all, a marvelous evocation of a time and place and of high school existence when it was considerably less ferocious than it is today. Like Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s sadly forgotten novel of adolescent uncertainty, “The City of Trembling Leaves,” it twitches aside the curtain to reveal the menace and mendacity lurking behind placid and mundane lives.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
FICTION
Sundown, Yellow Moon
By Larry Watson
$25.95
