Red Rover, Deirdre McNamer’s
fourth novel, begins with a gunshot. Maybe it’s an accident, or
maybe it’s a suicide. Then again, perhaps it’s something more. The
setting is Missoula, Mont., 1946, and the deceased is Aiden
Tierney, a former FBI agent who’d been fighting a disease caught
while chasing Nazis in Argentina. “Someone said the sheriff said
Aiden was examining the gun and must have dropped it, and the thing
went off,” says Aiden’s father. Pop doesn’t buy the accident
theory. “That boy’s been firing shotguns since he was nine years
old. You think he’s going to handle one so stupidly that it slams
him dead?”
When last we heard from Deirdre McNamer, one
of the West’s finest contemporary novelists, she’d written
My Russian, a boisterous, larger-than-life novel
packed with evangelists, trailer trash, murderers and mobsters. In
Red Rover, McNamer returns to her quieter
fictional roots – the small Montana towns and stoic characters that
moved through her earlier novels, Rima in the
Weeds and One Sweet Quarrel. After
opening with the crime, McNamer toggles between 1946 and 2003, when
the characters who know too much about Tierney’s death are living
out their final years working jigsaw puzzles at the old folks’
home.
The mystery revolves around Tierney and Roland
Taliaferro, Tierney’s friend and fellow G-man, the last person to
see Tierney alive. The author saves some of her best writing for
the small towns and secondary characters, though – the loony town
coroner, the ambitious young reporter, the gas station owner
hollowed out by the loss of a son in Vietnam. This is where
McNamer’s genius for capturing the unromantic realism of Montana
really shines. The tiny town of Neva “had become so elderly and
gray,” she writes, “that youth and noise jumped from its surface
like colored fish.”
McNamer isn’t averse to touching on
big global themes – J. Edgar Hoover and corporate profiteers come
in for some pounding – but the book’s true kin are quiet classics
like Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Leif Enger’s
Peace Like a River. This is territory where
folks like to just let things be. They don’t appreciate a ruckus
and they don’t want their memories sullied, especially by questions
about an upstanding citizen falling on his shotgun.
The author is a contributing editor at Outside
Magazine; his upcoming book is The Last Flight of the
Scarlet Macaw.
Red Rover
Deirdre McNamer
264 pages, hardcover:
$24.95.
Viking, 2007.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Mystery in Montana.
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