Homestead

The book Homestead I thought was a very good book. It had an intense written story line; the description on the setting and what the characters see is great. It was about a woman who lost her husband while her boys were still in their childhood, and then they grew and she was left all alone at home with no one to talk to her nearest neighbor was miles down the road. My book was about a family that moved from Washington to Montana because Annick's husband got a job as a professor at the UM. Her husband Dave became very ill with a disease that he wasn't going to get better from he died a few years later and she was stuck raising her boys all by herself. Her boys grew up and moved out and herself left her at home. She after a while started talking to other professors from other states and then began to travel all around she went to Alaska and went on a fishing boat with her companion Chris. My favorite part of the book was when she went back to Chicago and she was remembering how she used to walk on the beaches and how she was so comfortable with herself that the neighbors had complained to the cops and her father was told to do something about it.

Annick Smith has woven together material from a dozen or so short pieces published 1988-1994, and the result is this collage of memoir and travel writing. Settling near Missoula, Montana, in 1964, Smith was married to a university teacher and hopeful film writer, who died of heart failure, leaving her with four young sons. Adopting Montana as a home, she writes about the 163-acre "homestead" of the book's title, raising her sons and entertaining friends in a log house transported there from where it had been abandoned on a property 30 miles upriver.Actually, a river runs through this book. It's the Big Blackfoot River, the same one that figures in Norman Mclean's story about fly fishing and family. Maclean, in fact, lives close by, and she comes to know him, eventually becoming a guiding force behind the film adaptation. (She shares credits as co-producer with fellow writer and friend Bill Kittredge, and the film's director, Robert Redford. She has also produced the film "Heartland," set in frontier Montana. Her twin sons Alec and Andrew have become filmmakers in their own right, writing and directing "The Slaughter Rule," also set in Montana.)Smith's book meanders casually across a variety of topics. There are accounts of the Montana seasons, a local band called the Mudflaps, the work of brand inspectors, her Hungarian Jewish parents who live in Chicago, summers with her two young sisters on the Michigan shore of Lake Michigan, travels to Spain and Alaska, fishing and hiking, celebrity friends, family gatherings on holidays, Montana wildlife, the Nez Perce, and the environmental impact of mining and clear cutting. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Montana, the outdoors, Western living, and a certain 1960s spirit that survives among the graying hippies who once fled into what was then the wilderness. I also recommend Gretel Ehrlich's "The Solace of Open Spaces," about a California filmmaker who visits Wyoming and decides to stay.

I have read and loved all of those important voices in Montana's literary world: Dick Hugo, William Kittridge, Ivan Doing...but always wondered if there was someone representing my specific experience in the modern west. Annick Smith's HOMESTEAD is still echoing off of the top of my 6' body weeks after I turned the last page. She tells of being a woman who lives in the frontier of western Montana at the end of this century. She is a mom, a wife, a lover, a naturalist, a thinker, a writer, and an artist. She may be my mother's age, but she transends the generations and seems to to hold a steady voice across my generation, too. HOMESTEAD comments on life like a friend comments on a personal thought over a good cup of coffee. Take this book to bed with you on a long winter's night and read while the house is silent & dark...

Our book group read and loved this book. So much to think about and discuss -- a sort of female "River Runs Through It," because of its sumptuous references to occasions -- the food, the drink, the making of gatherings. The group admired Smith's extraordinary courage -- taking a young family abroad, bearing twins overseas, undertaking family life on a remote 163 acres of Montana's wildest. They loved her language: a "solitary dune girl" now "summer's white-haired child." This is an earthy, generous, candid, poetic story -- of universal appeal.

The author of one of my very favorite short stories, "It's Come to This," Annick Smith is a masterful writer with an amazing range. I found "Homestead" in the nature section at my bookstore, and bought it knowing that anything by A.N. would be worth reading. Don't hesitate: just send for it! To quote from Annie Dillard on the book jacket, "Here is a passionate story, beautifully told."