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Two writers, Ivan Doig and Norman Maclean, inspired me years ago to visit Montana, which has lots of room for good writing.
I've lived mostly on the East Coast and discovered another world in their books.
Doig's This House of Sky (1978) and Maclean's A River Runs Through It (1976) are about coming of age.
Both had trouble finding publishers. One New York editor complained that Maclean's story had too many trees in it. But both books have lived long and successful lives and remain in print.
Maclean was boosted by Robert Redford's 1992 movie and by a trendy passion for fly fishing.
Doig, who has written eight fine novels, hasn't found friends in Hollywood. He's not trendy but deserves to be better known. His writing is as well crafted as the best carpentry.
The Whistling Season does what Doig does best: evoke the past and create a landscape and characters worth caring about.
Set on the Montana prairie, it's a story any good teacher, or anyone who appreciates learning, should love. It's about a one-room school and the several kinds of education found in and out of the classroom.
Its narrator is the state school superintendent. In 1957, he is being pressured in the name of progress to close Montana's one-room schools, "the small arks of education such as the one that was the making of me."
The Soviet Union has launched the satellite Sputnik. And as the superintendent, Paul Milliron, puts it, "Science will be king, elected by panic."
Most of the story is set in 1909 when Paul was 13 and one-half of the entire seventh grade at Marias Coulee School.
His father, a widower, is attracted by an ad for a would-be housekeeper that proclaims, "Can't Cook, But Doesn't Bite." He hires the formidable Rose Llewellyn.
She arrives from Minnesota with her mysterious, erudite brother, Morris Morgan, a walking encyclopedia. He has fallen on hard times despite a University of Chicago education that hasn't worn off.
When the school's teacher elopes, Morris is pressed into service. He thrives, teaches Paul Latin and introduces new ideas. He wonders why "Thoreau, if he wanted a full-fathomed pool of solitude, had never joined the Oregon Trail migration and come west."
Paul asks, "Who's Thorough?"
Doig's pace is leisurely, but the plot takes a surprising twist. There's intrigue to be found on the prairie. His best characters are quietly heroic, perhaps too heroic, but the writing carries the novel.
It's filled with "veteran talkers," as Doig puts it. They're from an era when home entertainment was strictly do-it-yourself. To some, that's hopelessly old-fashioned. To me, it's lovely storytelling, whether you're in Montana or New York.
The Whistling Season
By Ivan Doig
Harcourt, 345 pp., $25
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