{"id":4119,"date":"2014-10-16T18:36:53","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T00:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=4119"},"modified":"2014-10-17T10:50:47","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T16:50:47","slug":"book-review-a-biased-but-honest-review-of-lancasters-latest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/10\/book-review-a-biased-but-honest-review-of-lancasters-latest\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: A biased but honest look at Lancaster’s latest"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter<\/em>, by Craig Lancaster, Lake Union Publishing, 2014. 286 pages, $14.95.<\/strong><\/p>\n

How am I biased toward Craig Lancaster, whose novel I am proposing to review today? Let me count the ways.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Later on\u2014apparently because working full time, writing books on the side and maintaining one of the most entertaining pages on Facebook didn\u2019t keep him busy enough\u2014he became a publisher, too, and the second book he took on was my collection of newspaper pieces.<\/p>\n

\"Hugo-pic<\/a>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.<\/p>\n

He won, which is only fair. I\u2019m 15 years older than Craig, but his newspaper experience has been vastly more varied than mine. He was also the first contributor<\/a> to Last Best News and he has continued to supply me, gratis<\/a>, with pieces<\/a> I am proud to publish.<\/p>\n

On top of everything else, my brother and I will be playing music at Craig\u2019s 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.).<\/p>\n

So, why write a review at all, given these acknowledged biases?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s simple. I like his writing, for one thing, and the pressures of running a one-person site like this mean that I can\u2019t imagine reading a book with Montana ties and not reviewing it. For another, I don\u2019t have to prevaricate or even fudge in order to recommend Lancaster\u2019s book (switching now to his surname as the review begins).<\/p>\n

So, what do we have here? Well, in tone, \u201cThe Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter\u201d is somewhere in the middle of his other novels, not so madcap funny as \u201c600 Hours of Edward\u201d and \u201cEdward Adrift,\u201d and not so serious as \u201cThe Summer Son.\u201d It is, rather, a fairly serious book frequently leavened by humor and Lancaster\u2019s light touch.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a grim introduction, and things get better only intermittently.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Interspersed throughout the narrative are excerpts of a book that Hugo is writing, hoping Westerly will help him finish it, mostly reflections on boxing, family and that other sweet science, love. In one excerpt he describes the boxer\u2019s routine, summing up the tragedy of his life:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was good at the getting in shape. I was good at the work. I was very, very bad at the nothingness in between.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old story, filling up that nothingness with booze, drugs and trouble, but this book doesn\u2019t follow the familiar arc of fame, fall and redemption. There\u2019s hardly an arc at all, which makes this book more difficult to settle into than Lancaster\u2019s earlier novels. It\u2019s more like real life, told in a fractured narrative that jumps around to different stages of Hugo\u2019s life and the lives of his friends and hangers-on.<\/p>\n

Westerly is one of those friends, and his attempts to deal with the ethical problems attendant on becoming friends with a man he\u2019s supposed to be writing about objectively (I hear you, brother) add up to one of the more interesting subcurrents of the book.<\/p>\n

Just as interesting is Westerly\u2019s relationship with Lainie, a good woman who works to restore Westerly\u2019s lacerated heart after a family tragedy and a painful divorce. Other characters include Frank Feeney, Hugo\u2019s old trainer and now a barkeep; Aurelia, Hugo\u2019s lovely, saintly grandmother; and Gene Trimear, the Herald-Gleaner\u2019s sports editor, a pitiful schmuck who is a good stand-in for any boss you\u2019ve ever loved to hate.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to tell you more about how perfect Lancaster\u2019s evocations of a newsroom are\u2014the camaraderie and the hostility, the hijinks and the repressed rage\u2014but read it for yourself and take my word that he nails it.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cIf you take on eastern Montana by way of Interstate 94\u2014and you really should exhaust all other possibilities for your life before you do. \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Through the book\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I suspect some readers will be disappointed that this novel does not have the consistently high spirits of the \u201cEdward\u201d books. But as Orwell said of Dickens and his \u201cPickwick Papers\u201d: \u201cWhat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

So let us be happy that Lancaster has the talent to write the \u201cEdward\u201d books and then move beyond them. If that\u2019s not enough consolation for you, I will say that in this novel we learn that tendrils of Hugo\u2019s story reach out to intertwine with the story of Edward Stanton.<\/p>\n

And since both \u201cEdward Adrift\u201d and \u201cThe Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter\u201d 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\u2019t know if Lancaster has any such ideas, but I don\u2019t see why not.<\/p>\n

We should have no reason to believe that Yellowstone County does not contain as many stories as Yoknapatawpha County.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1511,1512,1510,1514,93,1513],"class_list":["post-4119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-600-hours-of-edward","tag-edward-adrift","tag-the-fallow-season-of-hugo-hunter","tag-charles-dickens","tag-craig-lancaster","tag-george-orwell","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}