A Sudden Country

March 29, 2010

Reading the book A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher; she’s one of the featured writers at Fishtrap, where I won a fellowship for July so I thought I’d better read her book. It’s won or been nominated for a slew of awards and it turns out I remember this book being reviewed in Entertainment Weekly a few years ago and thought at the time it sounded intriguing.

“The tough poetry of Fisher’s novel buoys this chronicle of Oregon migation along on an incantatory wave. It’s 1847 and dour patriarch Israel Mitchell drags his reluctant wife , Lucy, and their chilren out to the Oregon Territory. Their paths cross with James McLaren, a bereaved Scot trapper whose children have all died from smallpox and whose Nez Perce wife has run off. Each day the murderous landscape spools mercilessly ahead of the emigrants, and Fisher’s depiction of a familiar seeming journey that is not adventurous, as myth would have it, but a daily exercise in folly and survival, is astonishing. A Sudden Country requires a patient reader, but the spell it casts is transformative and rare. The heartbreaking first chapter alone is worth any number of lesser novels.”

The review doesn’t lie. The first chapter left me breathless. When I finished the chapter I turned to Ted (we were both reading before bed) and said “Wow.” I didn’t have the words to describe how mesmerized and devastated I was by that first, extremely short chapter. This is what editors and agents mean when they say the first chapter (let alone the first page) must grab you and pull you in.

Happily, the rest of the book is proving just as beautifully written and intriguing and surprising. One particularly moving turn of phrase:

He remembered the dry grief cracking out.

Fisher is teaching a daily workshop called “Spirit and Matter in Historical Fiction” that I’ve signed up for. I can’t wait!

On a probably not-so-related note, or, well, speaking of the big country, the wild west, I watched “Calamity Jane“– the western musical starring Doris Day as the title character and Howard Keel as Wild Bill Hickok, her eventual love interest. The film and the Academy Award-winning song “Secret Love” is referenced in my book as is the hunky Howard Keel.  Though I think this photo on the left is from “Annie Get Your Gun” in which Keel also starred, this time playing opposite another brassy blonde: Betty Hutton.

“Calamity Jane” has its moments, but I was really just watching to see Keel (my main character has a crush on him; it’s easy to see why) and to hear the song. You can see/hear it here.