Bucking the Sun

Ivan Doig reminds me of Steinbeck, only funnier. He tells a "big" story but sticks tight to the little stories of his characters. My husband read this book, and it looked boring to me on the surface, but now I am off to find another Doig book to read. Writers like this give literature a good name by telling a complex tale in a compelling and simple fashion.

The characters in this novel are well described and true to the character of Montanans. Doig makes my heart ache for the people of a state I learned to love.

Despite the claims of some of the misleading reviews (including the Editorial review at the top of this page) this is not a murder mystery in any way. Yes, two of the characters do perish, as is revealed in the first chapter of the novel (which is not in chronological order with the rest), but this plays an absolutely minimal role in the story. While the question of who ultimately perishes does linger in the back of your mind while Doig relates the multi-faceted story of the Duff family, this is not a tale of a family coping with death. This is truly an epic story which combines interesting, developed, and, most of all, distinct characters with an extraodinarily well described setting- an enormous New Deal project and accompanying lively shantytown set amidst grand natural scenery. The result is a novel which anyone (though especially someone with an interest in or affinity for the American West) should thoroughly enjoy.

Bucking the Sun is an excellent work. Ivan Doig uses amazing description in his story of "The first family of the Fort Peck Dam". I highly recommend it to anyone.

I appreciated the sense of place and time that was so well evoked. I admired the characters, thier complexities, and the overlapping and differences among their personalities. But I missed the warmth and the sense of the moment that I got from English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair. I found many of the phrases, allusions, and figures of speech to be quite unnatural and unrealistic. I found myself doubting that anyone would talk that way. While the words chosen were interesting and evocative they didn't flow and contribute to my connection with the story and characters. In fact, I often found the manner of speech to be quite distracting. The dam was huge in life and in the story. I found that I could not easily follow some of the details about the design and construction but I also found that understanding the specifics was not necessary. What seemed to me to be important was the understanding that the dam was perhaps the major character in the novel with a life of it's own that grew in complexity as the structure itself built layer by layer. Much as the lives of the human characters interwove, unraveled, and were repaired.