waiting like a spider i too began this book expecting something similar to All The Pretty Horses. and the 1st few chapters seemed headed in that direction. then rossie meets eliza's parents and the whole feel of the novel changes.just go with it though. sometimes its good not to get what you THOUGHT you wanted. the storyline is good enough to keep you moving along even when you kinda start scratching your head at the ambiguous prose and unexpected direction changes.also i really came to love all the charecters in this book. everyone is so uniquely created and molded and its cool how rossie's family unit shapes and reshapes itself.in closing this is a very good piece of fiction. i believe most who pick it up will enjoy it.
A superb slice of twentieth century Americana In the 1930s fifteen year old Rossie Benasco son of the pit boss at the Riverside Casino in Reno obtains work as a wrango boy at the Neversweat Ranch owned by retired rodeo star Slivers Flynn. He and his employer's daughter Mattie are attracted to one another so Slivers offers Rossie a choice. He can herd several hundred horses through Idaho and Montana to Calgary or he can marry Mattie and raise a horde of kids. Not ready for children Rossie agrees to hit the trail.At the end of the thousand mile journey Rossie meets and falls in love with pregnant Scottish Eliza Stevenson. Her dad gives Rossie his Montana farm as a wedding present and soon she gives birth to a son that he adopts as his. The years go by Rossie runs the farm and he and Eliza adopt a daughter. In December 1941 he enlists in the Marines but is shot at home station and becomes a supply clerk. The years move on and so have their childrenWilliam Kitteredge is at his best with this homage to a bygone Americana rugged outdoors era. Readers will follow deeply Rossie's life from the 1930s as a teen through WWII on into the McCarthy period all the way up to 1991 when a family reunion with Mattie occurs. THE WILLOW FIELD is a superb slice of twentieth century Americana.
The Willow Field This novel does a good job with people and the rest is not as good. Fortunately there is a lot more of it about people than anything else. The latter part of the book is much better than the front part. At a third of the way through I was going to give it two stars the middle third gained it another star and only memories of the beginning kept the last third from raising it to five stars. This is the story of a boy Rossie and the progress of his growth as he lives out his life in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana. Rossie begins as a cowboy in Nevada and remains a horseman all his life. After he encounters Eliza she becomes a key element of the story. A number of other people enter the story at intervals and as is the case in life most remain more or less connected to the end. A few of the bit players are typical westerners but the psyches of the main characters are too unique to call typical. Kittredge is almost an icon of Montana literature although this is his first novel. He has filled this book with a great deal of what he has learned about Montana over decades perhaps he includes too much. There are countless descriptions of experiences events and geographical features recognizable by those familiar with Montana and its history. If you are an aficionado of Montana literature you might want to read this book with a notebook at hand and see how many allusions you recognize to other books. Some Kittredge spells out and others are subtle. One of the more obvious is the Missoula minister who is supposed to marry Rossie his name is Dr. McLean and they're legendary walkers and fishermen two brothers and the father. There are probably some references that were accidental but are simply part of Kittredge's vast knowledge of the state. If this book had a bibliography it would be at least three pages small type. One weakness especially in the front part of the book is some inaccuracies in time and space. Even a novel should be careful how it treats such things.
Style Far Exceeds Content I was expecting something along the lines of All the Pretty Horses. What I got was one of those stories kids make up on the spur of the moment when they're playing cowboys and indians outside or when they're imagining themselves playing in a big baseball game and hitting a gamewinning home run The crowd roars as I cross home plate! Wow was this storyline loose free to introduce anything at anytime. None of the characters are particularly endearing especially the main character. Kittredge is an accomplished wordsmith but he's established himself for me as no more than a secondrate pulp fiction writer albeit one with an obvious appreciation of the wonders of the West.
a life unexamined . . . Kittredge is a fine short story writer one of the best. Read to page 74 of this novel and you will be entertained by a fine story well told about a young man signing on with a horse drive from northern California to Calgary. Set in the worst years of the Depression it calls to mind an era when America and the American West were a very different place from what they are today.You can put the book down at that point because what follows is a long meandering search for any further illumination of the subjects it has raised. Most frustrating are the characters' impulsiveness and lack of apparent motivation or the need to explain themselves. When they talk they talk at each other preferring irony to revealing what they actually think or feel. Since the central character Rossie seems only to follow the path of least resistance trusting to luck his actions are chiefly determined by his libido and there are plenty of scenes of how that plays out. But it's a life that remains unexamined either by Rossie himself or by Kittredge.I hung on until halfway through the novel and finally jumped to the end where I found nothing that gave me the idea I'd missed anything. The characters were still opaque and unreflective still drinking and engaged in bantering aimless conversations.
The Willow Field I am an avid reader of of both nonfiction and fiction works about the American West and was really looking forward to this novel. However I absolutely hated it. I could not relate to most of the characters especially Eliza and Rossie. I have spent many years traveling throughout Montana western Oregon Idaho Wyoming etc. Mr. Kittredge's geographical mistakes were extremely annoying.
An instant classic Imagine the best book you've ever read. Then double it. Then double it again. Captivating characters wide and stunning imagery great story and of course the craftwork of a master. C''mon Kittredge give us another.
A Tin Horn Western At Best I stuck with before abandoning until the ending the pretentious overwrought dialog only because I was sick in bed with nothing else to read. Kittredge honed this novel to be a work of craftsmanship and he gets A for effort and the 2nd star for this rating which would otherwise be one star. But the novel is topheavy and cumbersome to follow after the cattle drive.The Willow Field is so titled one presumes because that place represents a time and space of innocence and the foreboding of its loss. But innocence is everywhere undermined by the cynical selfabsorbed characters who all speak in the same voice. Even our Cowboy when his cooptation was complete turns into one of the insipid high society bores.The novel is also not an accurate depiction of people especially women in 1933 nor of sexuality overplayed renditions of cock and not one mention of clitoris nor of horses and horsemanship which as a horseman is my raison de lire for Westerns. In one place the author equates colt to baby mare. A colt is a male a baby mare is a filly either could be a foal. A minor point perhaps but it tends to disqualify much else Kittredge says about horses and as others have pointed out about geography.Now that I am over my cold I will hasten a return to the real masters of this genreLouis L'Amour Zane Grey Elmer Kelton and JPS Brown.
Powerful Epic of the Amercan West William Kittredge has once again broken new ground this time with a powerful first novel a glorious epic of life in the American West in the early 1930s. As in his previous work A Hole in the Sky A Memoir Kittredge proves that he is a wordsmith of the first order.
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