Sundown, Yellow Moon
By Larry Watson
Random House, 309 pages, $25.95
A death out of the past, in this case, a murder in Bismarck, N.D., in 1961. The event stirs a middling talent of a fiction writer, who remains nameless throughout this engaging novel, to look back at this time when the father of his best friend shoots a state senator, and the friend’s girlfriend, for whom our narrator has been mad all throughout high school, gradually shifts her allegiance from one boy to the other. The possibilities for a novel about violence and its origins, about love and its wavering effects, and about the growth of character over time are enormous, as is the chance to illuminate life in one of the lesser-known quarters of the heartland.
Declaring his allegiance to such predecessors as William Maxwell (most strikingly in the brilliant short novel “So Long, See You Tomorrow”), and with echoes of Richard Ford’s Montana stories and an affinity with the plot of Deirdre McNamer’s recent Montana novel, “Red Rover,” Larry Watson succeeds impressively, especially in deepening our understanding of first love, something most of us long ago dropped from our grasp.
Sirens wail through the air as the story opens, just after Raymond Stoddard, father of the narrator’s pal, has committed his crime and returned to his house across the street of the narrator’s boyhood home. In fact, the two school chums enter the living room while Stoddard is still alive, and only after the boys leave does he go about his last business of hanging himself in the garage. The novel seems to hang in that tenuous period of time, between the memory of the narrator’s last encounter with the living Stoddard and his friend’s discovery of his father’s body.
Why did Stoddard murder the senator and then kill himself? The story dramatizes these questions, along with a study of the narrator’s tortured teenage love affair with his best friend’s girl, with a deep passion.
To accomplish this the writer-narrator not only takes us through the story but adds to it by inserting the texts of short fiction he has published in various little magazines over the course of his career, stories that take up the same characters, sometimes under different names, and give us his imagined understanding of why the real people acted as they did.
Looking back at these matters from some point beyond a marriage and divorce and the founding of a reasonably successful career as a fiction writer, the narrator tells us he is “still augmenting the story, though more now with human understanding than with factual details.
When he first left graduate school (a writing program at the University of Montana), the narrator believed he was ready to begin his explorations of difficult subjects, such as this one out of his own past. “I was,” he writes, “exactly where I wanted to be and ready to begin realizing my deepest literary aspirations. The mysteries of the human heart could be known, and I would devote my life to the careful search for words to convey that knowledge.” Well, not so fast, young man. One marriage and a period of self-exile in France later, he is still afflicted by his deeply remembered unrealized love and trying to piece together his past. Thus the composition of this novel.
But all of this theoretical grounding of the story aside, our writer tells most of his tale in a simple realistic style, in which he directly faces the turmoil created in his life and in his friends’ lives, and in the town, by the murder. Two tormented love affairs, not one, gradually emerge as the center of the novel, and the emotions behind the seemingly taciturn face of upper Midwestern life advance boldly to the fore. “[W]hat happens,” the narrator says, “can’t be pulled apart from where.” Larry Watson does a fine job of showing us the what even as he roots it deeply in the where.
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Alan Cheuse is a book commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” a writing teacher at George Mason University and the author, most recently, of the short-story collection “Lost and Old Rivers.”
