Prairie Nocturne

The full significance of this novel's evocative title does not become clear until the very closing pages, and that's fitting for a melodrama-historical-romance that holds its cards very close to the chest right up to each turn of the plot. There are in fact several narratives and themes that weave in and around each other, and Doig is careful to balance them artfully so that each new development has an element of the unexpected for the reader.The texture of Doig's narrative style is richly detailed, like tapestry. His characters and the exchanges between them spring strongly to life. You do not speed read for the plot but linger over the nuances of behavior, gesture, verbal inflection, thought, and feeling. Meanwhile, a compelling story is told of a black ranch hand and rodeo clown who is transformed under the guiding hand of a white voice teacher to become a rising star in the music world. Set in the 1920s, the story also portrays the social forces and prejudices that intrude on their growing relationship. And the reader learns how the KKK reached as far west as Montana with its use of secrecy and intimidation to enforce a code of racial and ethnic discrimination. Just as ugly, though not resorting to hoods and sheets, are those at the very highest social rungs who have their part to play in enforcing racial divisions.Set primarily in Montana, the book needs to look back only a generation to the immigrant homesteaders of the 1880s, the cavalry posts on the plains, the rise of the cattle barons, and the subduing of the Native Americans. Meanwhile, the trenches of WWI inhabit recent memory. The book captures the breadth of American life from the closing frontier on the one hand to jazz-age New York and the Harlem Renaissance on the other. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the historical West, relationships between strongly independent characters, the African-American experience, singing and voice training, and a richly textured, multi-layered style of storytelling. Doig is a master.

Alone, independent, and now in her forties, DANCING AT THE RASCAL FAIR's Susan Duff returns as one of three principal characters in Ivan Doig's seventh novel, PRAIRIE NOCTURNE. Set in 1924 Helena and in Montana's Two Medicine country wilderness, World War I hero and failed gubernatorial candidate, Wes Williamson, surprises his former paramour, Susan, with a request that she teach Monty Rathbun how to sing. The son of a buffalo soldier, Monty is a chauffer and former rodeo clown. Because he is black, Monty's rise to celebrity eventually stirs up racial prejudice in a subplot involving the local Ku Klux Klan. Though well written, blending a lovely story with plenty of Western history, landscape and lore, Doig's novel, much like a prairie, rambles on endlessly at times; Doig's PRAIRIE also tends to be dogged with digressions. But this is my only criticism of an otherwise satisfying historical novel, written by one of the finest Western writers spinning yarns today.G. Merritt

It should come as no surprise to any fan of western literature that Ivan Doig has returned to the necessary soil of Montana to tell his latest story. But that he has combined his familiar landscape and characters with a new twist might cause a pleasant wonder.In "Prairie Nocturne," the West?s pre-eminent literary novelist rides the wide-open range between Montana and New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, gathering a cast of players for one last inspired grasp at love and celebrity. In a Faulknerian flourish that has threaded through five of his six previous novels, Doig again populates his seventh with some familiar faces in old settings. What Doig fan would be astonished to find the indomitable Angus McCaskill making more than a cameo appearance in Doig?s newest novel?And lest any reader think Doig?s beloved landscape has been relegated to a cameo appearance shorter than any McCaskill?s, fear not. No western writer ? and Doig is the prime living model for that species ? can escape the ageless countryside?s effect on either character or author.Doig?s poetic prose is growing richer and more subtle with each book, like a stone in a river. In "Prairie Nocturne," as the narrative entwines the pasts and presents of its three principal characters, his essential themes re-emerge: family, landscape, childhood memory, loyalty, and the inescapability of our past.Doig?s characters, new and old, are unforgettable, and not just because he keeps bringing them back to life in subsequent books. He embroiders them with history, myth and sensuality. Combined with the timeless beauty of his own ancestral ground, they are fast becoming as much a part of the American mind-scape as the Snopes family of Yoknapatawpha.