The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter, by Craig Lancaster, Lake Union Publishing, 2014. 286 pages, $14.95.
How am I biased toward Craig Lancaster, whose novel I am proposing to review today? Let me count the ways.
I had already been at the Billings Gazette for many years when Craig signed on as our copy desk chief. Besides having a profound and persnickety love of language and a rare knack for writing headlines, Craig was just plain fun to have around. Given to wisecracks, endless pop culture allusions and cleansing bursts of obscenity, he kept things lively even under the most grinding circumstances of daily journalism.
Later on—apparently because working full time, writing books on the side and maintaining one of the most entertaining pages on Facebook didn’t keep him busy enough—he became a publisher, too, and the second book he took on was my collection of newspaper pieces.
Later still, when we both were itching to make our break from newspapers, I to launch this venture and he to be a novelist and freelance editor and designer, we spoke almost daily about our hopes and aspirations and our mutual desire to beat the other out the door.
He won, which is only fair. I’m 15 years older than Craig, but his newspaper experience has been vastly more varied than mine. He was also the first contributor to Last Best News and he has continued to supply me, gratis, with pieces I am proud to publish.
On top of everything else, my brother and I will be playing music at Craig’s book-launch party (Nov. 7, Harper & Madison, 7 p.m., six days after his first reading, at the Billings Public Library, Nov. 1 at 2 p.m.).
So, why write a review at all, given these acknowledged biases?
It’s simple. I like his writing, for one thing, and the pressures of running a one-person site like this mean that I can’t imagine reading a book with Montana ties and not reviewing it. For another, I don’t have to prevaricate or even fudge in order to recommend Lancaster’s book (switching now to his surname as the review begins).
So, what do we have here? Well, in tone, “The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter” is somewhere in the middle of his other novels, not so madcap funny as “600 Hours of Edward” and “Edward Adrift,” and not so serious as “The Summer Son.” It is, rather, a fairly serious book frequently leavened by humor and Lancaster’s light touch.
It is narrated by Mark Westerly, a sportswriter for the Billings Herald-Gleaner, a name just awful enough to sound real. Westerly tells the story of a has-been boxer, Hugo Hunter, whom he has been covering for most of his career.
Hugo is broken down when we meet him, a very old 37 and fresh off his first experience with being knocked out, at the hands of a punk nobody in the forlorn ring of the Babcock Theatre. It’s a grim introduction, and things get better only intermittently.
“It wasn’t an everyday kind of job. It was vast stretches of nothing to do except goof off, followed by a short, intense period of getting in shape, followed by a few minutes of work.
“I was good at the getting in shape. I was good at the work. I was very, very bad at the nothingness in between.”
It’s an old story, filling up that nothingness with booze, drugs and trouble, but this book doesn’t follow the familiar arc of fame, fall and redemption. There’s hardly an arc at all, which makes this book more difficult to settle into than Lancaster’s earlier novels. It’s more like real life, told in a fractured narrative that jumps around to different stages of Hugo’s life and the lives of his friends and hangers-on.
Westerly is one of those friends, and his attempts to deal with the ethical problems attendant on becoming friends with a man he’s supposed to be writing about objectively (I hear you, brother) add up to one of the more interesting subcurrents of the book.
Just as interesting is Westerly’s relationship with Lainie, a good woman who works to restore Westerly’s lacerated heart after a family tragedy and a painful divorce. Other characters include Frank Feeney, Hugo’s old trainer and now a barkeep; Aurelia, Hugo’s lovely, saintly grandmother; and Gene Trimear, the Herald-Gleaner’s sports editor, a pitiful schmuck who is a good stand-in for any boss you’ve ever loved to hate.
I’d like to tell you more about how perfect Lancaster’s evocations of a newsroom are—the camaraderie and the hostility, the hijinks and the repressed rage—but read it for yourself and take my word that he nails it.
The same goes for his descriptions of Billings and Eastern Montana, from the aforementioned Babcock Theatre to the Rimrocks, the Heights and the drive to Sidney and beyond. He begins an account of such a drive like this: “If you take on eastern Montana by way of Interstate 94—and you really should exhaust all other possibilities for your life before you do. …”
Through the book’s many meanders, it always comes back to Hugo, and to the way the people in his life continue to love and cherish and protect him despite a championship string of failures and screw-ups. The art of this book is how it makes the reader understand exactly why Hugo is worthy of such devotion, even while you occasionally would like to slap some sense into him.
I suspect some readers will be disappointed that this novel does not have the consistently high spirits of the “Edward” books. But as Orwell said of Dickens and his “Pickwick Papers”: “What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.”
So let us be happy that Lancaster has the talent to write the “Edward” books and then move beyond them. If that’s not enough consolation for you, I will say that in this novel we learn that tendrils of Hugo’s story reach out to intertwine with the story of Edward Stanton.
And since both “Edward Adrift” and “The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter” have open-ended conclusions, it is within the realm of possibility that all these threads could be gathered together in some future novel. I don’t know if Lancaster has any such ideas, but I don’t see why not.
We should have no reason to believe that Yellowstone County does not contain as many stories as Yoknapatawpha County.
