An Unfinished Life

AN UNFINISHED LIFE sat on my bookshelf for three years. I'd see it there but choose something else to read. All the same, I always knew I'd want to read it. In time. The cover alone kept my interest. I'd never read anything by Mark Spragg before though so for some reason, kept passing it over. Then, last week, its turn came and I started reading it. It grabbed ahold of me immediately. I was transported to Wyoming, a state I've only driven through but which appealed to me in its own unique way. I'd read and then have to make lunch or do the laundry but even when I was doing something else, I was thinking about Einer and Mitch, Griff and Jean, and their relationships with each other and with their pasts. The book is marvelous and definitely made me want to get in the car and head west as soon as I could. Since I can't, I'll continue to visit in my mind and reflect in Mark Spragg's incredible painting of a place few of us even think about on a regular basis. As a side note, the movie (Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman) is stunningly wonderful and if you've seen it, you'll certainly want to read the book since it is, of course, 100 times better.

Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but I love the characters in An Unfinished Life. Mark Spragg has nailed old men with regrets, a woman with a sordid past, and a young girl with hope.

Mr. Spragg has given us a wonderful, simple story presented in a smooth style with delightful prose. I found it interesting that there was not one character in the book that I was unable to picture clearly in my mind as I read. This is a notable feat for such a short work. The author has taken a subject, a problem, which is all too common in our country today, and given it life and understanding, as far as we can understand such a thing as abuse. I had to agree with another reviewer, that we do see a bit of "To Kill a Mocking Bird" in this one, yet it is, at the same time, quite different. I was pleased that so much was presented through the eyes of a child. I also found the humor to be quite applicable when it was used. I was pleased to find that a movie is apparently to be made of this one and I do hope the makers of that movie do not screw it up, which is so often the case. All in all, I highly recommend this one.

Every life is unfinished; there is never enough time to meet all of our goals, fulfill all of our potential, satisfy all of our yearnings. Each death is its own half-forgotten story, its incomplete symphony, its fragmentary first novel sitting on the shelf, yellowed papers curling up to the ceiling. To personalize things for a moment, it doesn't matter whether I die next Friday or three hundred years from now in the best hospital on Mars. My life will still be unfinished. There are a hundred reasons why. Four quick examples: I will never take the field for the Texas Rangers at Arlington Stadium; I will never get to sing in public; I will never discover a cure for any disease; and I will never manage to write as well as Mark Spragg. It is not unfinished lives that Spragg is writing about here. It is not a what-if novel; the dead do not hang around like Marley's ghost, trying to do what was left undone in life. Instead, AN UNFINISHED LIFE is about the long-term effects of tragedy; how tragedy radiates through the years, sending out resonance frequencies that vibrate throughout the lost years, showing up now and again, repeating their patterns over and over. It is the long-ago death of Griff Gilkyson that concerns us here. We know nothing of him, practically, except that he was born, died young, and left a void in the hearts of his father, Einar Gilkyson, his wife Jean, and the daughter he never met. Ten years later, Jean and her daughter (also named Griff) return to Einar's remote Wyoming ranch, shaking off a Midwestern exile spent in trailer parks and women's shelters. Spragg tells the story from a variety of shifting viewpoints --- something that you're expressly told not to do at writer's conferences, but something that you can do if you write as well as this author. It helps to have, as Spragg does, a knack for dry, spare dialogue and sharply delineated characters ---- whether those characters are vulnerable ten-year old girls, or lonesome ranchers, or abusive boyfriends. That's the obvious point to make; what is less obvious is that, unlike the other characters, the main character here --- the state of Wyoming itself --- doesn't get its own chapter, nor does it need one. In a way, AN UNFINISHED LIFE is about how the characters relate to the empty spaces and dusty roads of rural Wyoming as much as how they relate to one another. Spragg's Wyoming is a place of wide vistas and long rides in pickup trucks that can be as confining and claustrophobic as your closet at home, depending on your options and opportunities. It is still a half-wild place. The big attraction in Ishawooa, Wyoming is the zoo, filled with local animals "with names and sad stories," from distressed sandhill cranes to captive rattlesnakes. The Wyoming landscape, it seems, is so stark and forbidding that even the native animals have problems adapting to it. Spragg's writing, like the Wyoming landscape, is spare and unadorned, but it is also uncommonly beautiful in the right l