Any reader seeking a refreshing corrective to the soap opera version of the American West offered by Paramount’s TV hit “Yellowstone” would be well advised to pick up Callan Wink’s new novel, “Beartooth.” Although both are set in Montana, their perspectives are radically different.
Whereas “Yellowstone,” channeling “Dallas” and “The Godfather,” focuses on a rich and powerful ranching clan that defends its immense landowning interests through coldblooded violence and high-level political skulduggery, “Beartooth” shows us the struggles of two ordinary members of the rural precariat: the brothers Thad and Hazen, trying without much success to make ends meet after the death of their father. There are no prize stallions, private helicopters or cowboy hats to be found in “Beartooth” and no patriotic paeans to private property either.
Wink offers instead a rawer, much less melodramatic version of the contemporary West in which the main challenge is not to conserve power and perpetuate a dynasty but to put new tires on the old truck, fill the propane tank for winter and fix the leaking roof.
Plunged into debt by the cost of their father’s medical treatments, Thad and Hazen, who usually get by cutting and selling wood, are forced to resort to more lucrative but less legal ways of earning money. The novel opens with them hunting black bears out of season in order to harvest their gallbladders for the Asian market, a scheme suggested by a sinister local fixer called the Scot.
As the story develops, the growing conflict between Thad and the Scot, an odd character who has a murderous past, wears a kilt and plays a set of bagpipes he has fashioned himself from bog oak and elk hide, generates most of the novel’s dramatic energy, while the sudden and unexpected arrival of the brothers’ previously absent mother, a hippyish van dweller named Sacajawea (after Lewis and Clark’s guide), provides a more emotionally nuanced domestic subplot.
“Beartooth” is occasionally aware of the larger politics of the West — there are wealthy blue-state newcomers at the margins of the story and Thad is prone now and then to bursts of environmental musing — but such concerns are never central. Wink wants to move and excite the reader more than to educate or argue, and judged on those terms the novel is largely a success.
It is at its best when it shows Thad and Hazen working outdoors, whether hauling dead bears back to the trailhead, gathering wood from the site of a 100-acre microburst or, in the story’s major set piece, venturing into Yellowstone National Park in order to smuggle out a valuable haul of elk antlers to be sold via the Scot to make chandeliers. These action-filled passages are absorbing, elegantly written and sometimes thrilling. Wink is especially alert to the constant physical hardships involved in such labor and describes the brothers’ sufferings with a terse and affecting lyricism.
The novel is deliberately fast-paced from the beginning, made up of short unnumbered chapters, some less than a page long. This speed is exhilarating, but in the last quarter it also encourages an unfortunate kind of sketchiness. Some important scenes speed past too quickly for the reader to fully appreciate what is happening, and the characters become less real and convincing as a result. Hazen, in particular, is rushed offstage in a way that is both convoluted and insufficiently explained. I felt, upon finishing, that “Beartooth” could happily have been 50 pages longer than it is, and that a slower, more fully realized final act would have better ended what is overall an original and impressive piece of work.
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