That got me thinking. What is it about such a book that causes me to be moved by it? It is hard to put a finger on such things, but I came up with a few. The prose itself, obviously. If there is such a thing as magic in the world, I see it when a writer gathers words onto a page in a way that seems as if they carry themselves. They are arranged as a score of music, rhythmically sound and tuned to just the right pitch, making something inside you dance.
Such as the following. Here is what awaits when you crack open the first book in Doig's Montana Trilogy, English Creek:
"That month of June swam into the Two Medicine country. In my life until then I had never seen the sidehills come so green, the coulees stay so spongy with runoff. A right amount of wet evidently could sweeten the universe. Already my father on his first high patrols had encountered cow elk drifting up and across the Continental Divide to their calving grounds on the west side. They, and the grass and the wild hay meadows and the benchland alfalfa, all were a good three weeks ahead of season. Which of course accounted for the fresh mood everywhere across the Two. As is always said, spring rain in range country is as if halves of ten-dollar bills are being handed around, with the other halves promised at shipping time. And so in the English Creek sheepmen, what few cowmen were left along Noon Creek and elsewhere, the out-east farmers, the storekeepers of Gros Ventre, our Forest Service people, in just everyone that start of June, hope was up and would stay strong as long as the grass did."There you have it. June does not just come as the next page on the calendar. It swims in with an abundance of rain in a place that otherwise aches for it. In that small way he has told you so much about this place and yet allowed you to gather even more about it from what he has not told you. It is not enough rain, but the right amount of wet that does not just make things better, it sweetens the universe. And people are not simply feeling good about it. Hope was up. What a thing of beauty. It is one thing to say something; it is another to be able to tell it in a way that makes people feel it in their bones.
I have read all of Doig's work. His memoir of growing up in Montana, This House of Sky, is altogether the finest homage to a place as I have ever read. It is my opinion, though, that in a body of work that as a whole is of the highest quality a writer can produce, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is far and away his best. It is for me perhaps the penultimate example of the kind of writing that I wish to savor for a very long time. In it Doig is able to capture the full complexity of human life, both the lovely and the serene -- all that is to be savored -- and the anguish and the terribleness -- all that fills us with dread. What he has crafted with mere words is life shown among all its layers, in all its dimensions, cluttered by all its unanswerable questions, so clearly and so astoundingly rendered through lives not our own, but draped in the possibility that they could be.
And, of course, there is the way he writes the place. My own memories are both rested upon and bounded by a certain landscape. The shape of terrain, the carving paths of rivers and streams, the weather and wind, these help to tell the stories of places and the people that inhabit them. And how those people live upon the land and amongst one another. I most enjoy writing in which these things figure prominently.
From Dancing at the Rascal Fair:
"So, the widebrimmed Montana, this was. The Montana of plain arising to foothills ascending to mountains, the continent going through its restless change of mood right exactly here."Passages like that make me smile. And wear out the pencils I keep nearby for underlining them. I have come to learn that reading a book of this sort once again makes it more and more a part of me. It makes for great pleasure to discover all over again the things that made you love something in the first place.
