To brand a novel a “Western” is to load it with baggage: purple sage, thundering hooves, quick-draw horsemen, gratuitous lawlessness. So let’s stop short of categorizing Lin Enger’s latest novel, “The High Divide,” a Western. Let’s remove those shackles because this captivating story is more nuanced than that.
Yes, it’s set in the mythic, post-Civil War West (specifically, that stretch of windswept high plain from western Minnesota, through the Dakotas to eastern Montana), and many of the familiar tropes are evident: hardscrabble towns, long landscapes, bison herds and dusty chaps. But what matters here isn’t cowboy swagger or pistol spinning — it’s the resonant inner lives of the compelling characters.
It doesn’t take long for a reader to recognize that Enger’s inspiration for this wanderer’s story is Homer’s “The Odyssey” — the wanderer in Enger’s book is called Ulysses, after all. He’s disappeared from his family in tiny Sloan’s Crossing, Minn. (not far from the border with Fargo, the gateway city to the Dakota Territory), leaving behind his family: Gretta, his Danish-born wife, who is in debt to the town cad; Eli, the restless teen son; and young Danny, prone to debilitating headaches — and prophetic visions.
Eli uncovers a clue: A note to his father from a woman in Bismarck, deeper in the Dakota territory, suggesting a relationship of sorts with Ulysses. Eli (much like Telemachus in “The Odyssey”) is determined to rebuild the family and sets out secretly one night on a self-determined mission to find Ulysses. He doesn’t count on young Danny tagging along, but naturally Danny does.
And we’re off, to Bismark and well beyond, deep into Montana. The adventure unfolds in prose at turns rollicking and sanguine; Enger is a master of pacing, and once you start turning the pages, there’s no setting the book down. Eli emerges as the most compelling character. His alternating anger at, and desperation for, his father drives him ever forward, caring little for comfort or coherence. But Dad remains always a day, or a step, ahead of them, journeying in the creeks and scrubland of that swath of the Great Plains that’s so often overlooked in contemporary fiction.
An example:
“They rode out that day at sun-up with a breeze behind them, the sky cloudless and light blue. Before crossing at the shallow ford north of town, they stopped to survey the country beyond the Yellowstone, rolling and dusty brown, buffalo grass as far as you could see, not a tree or a bush in sight except for what grew along the riverbank and bluffs. No shade and nowhere to hide.”
Enger exercises an exacting adroitness when painting the Wild West — saloons, shopkeepers, muddy streets, Indians on the horizon — all should be cliché, and would be in another writer’s hands, but Enger gives them freshness and clarity.
There are conveniences, of course. This is fiction, after all, so when a campfire in the distance belongs to a long-sought character from another part of the country we are willing to accept it, but readers will embrace this compelling story, even those who aren’t predisposed to Westerns.
FICTION: WESTERN
WESTERN
The High Divide
by Lin Enger (Algonquin)
