Claire Davis (2)Critiques

Got very good reviews. I found a little farfetched, did not like Cas that much.

Well-written Montana novel about a Sheriff and his dealings with a self-destructive rancher. Kind of tragic but worth reading. A bit too explicit in some parts, maybe. I hope the author keeps writing.

was a ok book

Well written, each character expressing their inner thoughts.

Strong sense of place with the bleak winter landscape in Montana. A strained marriage, the past catching up, a twisted mind and revenge. A slow-moving psychological thriller.½

I don't give star ratings to books by faculty members of my MFA program.

Claire Davis's first novel builds from the small to the epic, an engaging read that moves along quickly. It's a story told from several different perspectives, one of them increasingly twisted, written in Claire's full-throated and inimitable style.

It's particularly notable for the sense of place. I enjoyed the artistry in the way two places were depicted; rural Montana, throughout, and softer Midwestern farmland through Ike's point of view. The latter place emerges partly through definition, partly by contrast with the main setting; an interesting technique. Moreover, the lasting impression of the uncaring Montana wilds isn't personified. Claire Davis manages to paint the landscape in all its fury while leaving it empty.

this novel had a sinuous way about it similar to its eponymous creature. Quick to slip away from scrutiny too intense or a light too bright being cast upon it, it still made for an enjoyable read.

The prologue of this book may be its very best bit: haunting, beautiful as a reflection on the transitory miraculous nature of love. That being said, there is plenty more worth coming across in the rest of the novel.

Nancy is our main character and a biologist by training. She makes her way through the canyons pursuing snakes and cataloging their behavior: a task that would send most people screaming into the night, but perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone who has one, many times she prefers a nest of serpents to her own family.

There is a strange and ineffable dynamic between Nancy and her younger sister Meredith develops as a thread of narrative focus. Though their interactions seem authentic and resonant, I think the story would have been better served by a deeper exploration of the sibling relationship between these sisters.

Apart from Nancy’s sister, there is also Ned, her husband. Blythe and harmless on his face, there is still something vaguely disturbing about his apparent lack of depth. When we begin riding around in Ned’s mind rather than observing him externally, stray thoughts begin to confirm something is amiss. Ned’s behavior devolves over the course of the tale and many of those niggling doubts about him we feel initially are justified.

I find it a little difficult to quantify what it is I think this novel is “about”; it seems part never-to-be-solved-mystery, part character study, part portrait of family dynamics. All of these elements appear, but none takes a dominant place as the clear theme of the tale. Despite this diffuse plot tendency, I still found the writing to be engaging and enjoyable to read. Bonus points for vivid descriptions of Hells Canyon and environs.

Well written second novel. Author totally captured me with the sparsely given clues to the grade school principal's secret life. It made me understand the stories you hear about true marriages in which the wife has no idea she is married to a killer-rapist.

I think it's probably the better part of valor to refrain from giving star ratings to books written by my professors, on the off-chance that someday I don't like one of 'em.

This is a fine collection of short stories. The conflicts and plots tend to arise organically out of character, out of the natural ebb and flow of relationships, aging, aspiration and frustration. Claire's relationships tend to have the texture and idiosyncracies of real things. However, that is not to say that these stories are just about relationships. Things do happen in these stories, and in reading the book, I must confess, I did on occasion laugh and at least once cry.

Frozen Cattle, Hot Writing
A Review by David Abrams
09/14/2002


In her debut novel, Winter Range, Claire Davis performs a marvelous, mysterious trick: She perfectly blends plot, character and language and makes it look as easy as a cowboy roping a steer.

It took Davis two years and countless revisions to craft this near-flawless novel of hard times in the modern West, but the sweatstains aren't even noticeable. Davis comes across like a writer with several books under her belt—especially when your eyes fall across lyrical sentences like these:
It was so still. The land and house and even the stars seemed frozen in place. The cattle were a darker piece of the night, as though the evening had congealed in solid fragments on the snow.
and
Ahead of them, the snow pitched into the headlights, the fields were a billowing white and seemed to glow as if the earth beneath were lamp-lit.
and
Sunlight buttered the counter surface.
Winter Range is filled with passages like that. Words come in a flurry of delicate snowflakes and settle gently on the tongue. Davis makes writing look effortless.

Sheriff Ike Parsons, the book's main character, doesn't have it so easy. For three years, he's been the long arm of the law in a small unnamed town in northeastern Montana since moving there from Milwaukee. He's married a third-generation local girl, Pattiann, but he still feels like an outsider.

It doesn't help matters when he finds himself engaged in a war of wills with local rancher Chas Stubblefield, who's allowing his cattle to starve to death. The thirty-three-year-old rancher has fallen on hard times in the bitter winter, and when he can't get a bank loan for more feed, he withdraws into self-pity and apathy. Parsons heads out to the rancher's spread to offer assistance and what he finds shocks him to the marrow of his morality: cattle freezing where they stand, and a brooding, maniacal Stubblefield near bankruptcy, cooking up the steaks from his dying herd.

Stubblefield is too proud to accept help; after all, he comes from “a long line of survivors.�€? Montanans as a whole have a lineage of survival, but what Stubblefield does shocks the folks in town. As Davis writes,
This was a community that knew each other's families and histories and shared the same jokes, and one person's grief became another's. Shame ran deepest. All of them were stung by Chas's shameful act, the cruelty of it, because that worked at the fabric of their lives—these animals, this way of life—all of it dependent on a basic respect for what was given into your hands.
Parsons decides to take matters into his own hands and gets a court order for the cattle. That's when trouble brews like thunderheads on the horizon. Stubblefield, already an unbalanced character dealing with an abusive past, takes revenge on the community.

Compounding the drama is the fact that Parson's wife Pattiann was once involved with Stubblefield during her wild youth. Davis sets up the conflict neatly, giving us bits and pieces of the characters' histories little by little so that it gathers momentum all the way to a shattering conclusion. The final chapter is a gripping one where Parsons, Pattiann, and Stubblefield meet their destinies in an ice storm of Biblical proportions. When Winter Range is made into a movie—and it's got the kind of dramatic oomph that's sure to capture Hollywood's attention—I'll be the first in line to see it.

However, Davis' way with words is something the movies could never recreate. Her sex scenes are tender (yet earthy), her descriptions of landscape are dazzling and her characters are completely unforgettable.

There have been a lot of books written about the modern American West, and I've read my fair share of them—novels and memoirs alike—but this is one of the few instances where the author has managed to get everything just right.

It's a hostile land whose clamped-mouth inhabitants aren't always receptive to outsiders. In the wide open spaces of Montana's hi-line, it can be an hour's drive between ranches; and a bank loan can make all the difference between a community's survival or failure. Davis captures all those little details of living in a small town and an ice-locked landscape. She also kindles the genuine warmth of a close-knit people and their social rituals—a funeral and a community dance come alive with equal passion.

Sure, she makes a few first-novelist mistakes—an early scene in a barbershop introduces too many characters too quickly, a couple of plot strands don't lead anywhere—but those are minor piffles that will blow away like a drift of loose snow. Winter Range is, through and through, a triumphant blare on the trumpets announcing the arrival of an important new talent.

was a ok book