I first read about American Copper in my local newspaper and was quite intrigued. I am very interested in the history of my new home state; the good and the bad. Montana is known as the treasure state and it has a wealth of them – underground and above. It’s a land of coal, silver, copper, and gold below and of unparalleled beauty above. It has exploited both since it was discovered much to the resident’s detriment and benefit. One only has to see Glacier, Yellowstone or any of the state parks to appreciate the beauty and then look to the Berkeley Pit or any of the many other Superfund sites in the state for the destruction ravaged upon the state in the service of the mining industry.

But American Copper is so much more than a book about copper mining, it’s my 5th 5 star book of the year. It takes place in the early part of the last century. It was a time of growth and expansion for the country and Montana. Mr. Ray has a magical way with words and is especially skilled with creating mood and drawing his reader into the world of his characters.

The book is at it’s heart a story, as they say, as old as time. In more ways than one. Perhaps it’s really two stories; the story of the love of two men for one woman and the story of the evil that is done to those deemed different. In this case it’s the Cheyenne and to a degree the Chinese. The plot is not one I’d call fast paced but the writing is so magical it carries you along as you read about the good, bad and just awful of the loves and lives of the characters in American Copper.… (plus d'informations)

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BooksCooksLooks | 2 autres critiques | Sep 26, 2016 |

American Copper: A Novel par Shann Ray

AMERICAN COPPER, by Shann Ray.

Wow! That was what I felt - and even said aloud - when I finally reached the end of Shann Ray's AMERICAN COPPER. Because it's a WOW read, and I mean it is one helluva story. And it's his first novel, which makes it even that much more amazing.

Set in Montana in the early years of the Twentieth Century, with some flashbacks to the previous century, to the Sand Creek Massacre and the Little Big Horn, the characters are spread from the Cheyenne Peace Chief, Black Kettle, all the way into the 1930s. The modern principals here are several. There is the wealthy and ruthless Copper King, Josef Lowry, who owns half of Butte and copper mines all over Montana, and tries to own his daughter in the same iron-fisted way. His daughter Evelynne, is a strong-willed young woman and a gifted poet who aspires to a life apart from her father, who she loves and hates. William Black Kettle, a descendant of the Chief, is a champion rodeo roper who, like his ancestor, wants peace between the races. And there is Zion, aka "Middie," an orphaned giant of a man, a horse whisperer and brawler. How these lives intersect, well, therein hangs our tale.

One could probably call this a western. And it certainly is that. It does, after all, have cowboys and Indians - Indian cowboys even. And there is plenty of riding and roping, along with saloon brawls, and even chases and angry lynch mobs. But it's also an unlikely romance; a story of star-crossed lovers. There is even a Quasimodo-Esmeralda or Beauty and the Beast story-line. And there are certainly good guys and bad guys galore. There is love and hatred and racial strife. In the end, however, we have an age-old story, summed up by the man Zion -

"There are only two races of men, he told himself. Decent and unprincipled."

I was not totally unfamiliar with the work of Shann Ray. I read his story collection, AMERICAN MASCULINE, a few years back, and it was excellent. Since then I have learned he is also a poet, and, while I have yet to read any of his poems, that sensibility is readily evident in his prose. Here are just a few examples -

"They watched a skein of sandhill crane glide the stream on a path south."

or -

"Woman of bone and light, her hair let down over white, white skin. Her hair drawn by wind, the gray-black of the horse and the black-red of her hair above the shoulders of the horse like a fire."

or -

"His movements were uncommon and elegant. Like an eagle, she thought, or a lion on the mountain. He was long, and he moved with ease. His face had been a wonder of invitation."

or, one more -

"In the blackness below, the creatures moved and made their way, bear and badger and wolf, deer and antelope and elk. Coyote moved among them, with the memory of bison a dark shawl on the land."

This is language that cries out to be read aloud. Poetry. Such lines accumulate slowly and beautifully, as Ray carefully crafts a compelling story that moves at first slowly, setting the scene, then builds quickly in intensity and drama. You will find yourself turning the pages faster and faster. Because Ray is more than a poet. He is a superb storyteller, and AMERICAN COPPER is a story of love, hate, and forgiveness that will resonate. It will be hard to let go of these characters. They will haunt you for a long time. This is a beautiful book, and an important one. My very highest recommendation.… (plus d'informations)

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TimBazzett | 2 autres critiques | Nov 29, 2015 |

American Copper par Shann Ray

This book is a gift which everyone should open.

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davidabrams | 2 autres critiques | Sep 24, 2015 |

American Masculine: Montana Stories par Shann Ray

Some of our earliest printed literature came as a result of medieval monks secluding themselves in scriptoriums, devoting days, months, entire lives to copying sacred texts by hand. In daily ritual, these early scribes bent over the manuscript, moved pen to ink and back to page, painstakingly forming each letter with diamond precision. In the depths of the monastery, there was little sound but the faint whistle of breath from nostril and mouth, and--slightly louder--the scratch of quill on vellum. The creation of words was an act of worship.

Reading American Masculine, I began to think Shann Ray approaches his fiction with the same holy devotion. Each sentence carries the weight of an author sitting at his keyboard combing through language for hours until the right word arrives, one which jigsaws neatly into the surrounding words, a marriage of syntax and meaning. The stories in this collection from Graywolf Press are set in the American West--primarily Montana--and they are populated with tough men and tougher women, souls knotted hard by the blistering circumstances of domestic abuse and alcohol, but the pages of American Masculine are no less illuminating than those of the 13th-century monks. Ray writes not to entertain with clever plots or pyrotechnic language; his intent is to blast our souls loose with simple tales built on old-fashioned morality.

Though the stories stop short of preaching and proselytizing, some readers might be put off by the uncompromising spiritual center to be found throughout the book, but that would be their loss if they walk away from American Masculine. This is one of the more challenging set of short stories I've read in a long time--it pokes my conscience and gently leads me to self-examination. Am I better man for reading American Masculine? I don't know, but I do feel refreshed and invigorated. In his day job, Ray teaches courses in leadership and forgiveness at Gonzaga University and some of that inevitably spills over onto the pages of the book.

The cover design shows two bison butting heads, hooves churning the earth, dust flying from their shaggy hides. So it goes with the stories where characters fight each other and, more often, themselves as they strive for the better angels of their nature. In the first story, "How We Fall," Benjamin Killsnight, who "worked on small hopes and limited understanding," wrestles against the alcoholic heritage of his Northern Cheyenne upbringing:

Benjamin had been a drinker since an uncle started him on it in grade school. Same uncle forced a drunk Sioux woman on him when Ben was thirteen and he had run from the house, crying from her terrible fingers.

The cultural stereotypes of the drunk Indian and Marlboro cowboy limn the edges of the fiction here. Ray wants us know he acknowledges that baggage but he is working on a new image of the West--one where grace and brutality co-exist. Adapt and overcome the harsh conditions, as long as you learn something along the way.

Ray is unflinching in his descriptions of violence. A father breaks his son's nose and it makes the sound "like a bootstep on fresh snow." In another story, a fistfight puts us right there at the knobby end of knuckles:

He seeks only the concave feel of facial structure, the slippery skin of cheekbones, the line of a man's nose, the loose pendulum of the jawbone and the cool sockets of the eyes. He likes these things, the sound they make as they give way, the sound of cartilage and the way the skin slits open before the blood begins, the white-hard glisten of bone, the sound of the face when it breaks. But he hates himself that he likes it.

That comes from my favorite story in the book, "The Great Divide." It's a masterfully-told mini-biography of a bull rider named Middie (the self-hating fighter) who ends up working as a "muscle man" keeping peace on a passenger train and tossing off drunks when they pull into the station. In an earlier section of the story, we see Middie as a teenager walking a fenceline in a whiteout, searching for his abusive father who left the house three days earlier and never returned:

Walking, the boy figures what he’s figured before and this time the reckoning is true. He sees the black barrel of the rifle angled on the second line of barbed wire, snow a thin mantle on the barrel’s eastward lie. He sees beneath it the body-shaped mound, brushes the snow away with a hand, finds the frozen head of his father, the open eyes dull as gray stones. A small hole under the chin is burnt around the edges, and at the back of his father’s head, fist-sized, the boy finds the exit wound.
When the boy pulls the gun from his father’s hand two of the fingers snap away and land in the snow. The boy opens his father’s coat, puts the fingers in his father’s front shirt pocket. He shoulders his father, carries the gun, takes his father home.

The scene is shocking in its details, but there is something about that act of putting his father's fingers in his pocket that speaks of tenderness and forgiveness for all the beatings that the father administered.

In many instances, it is the landscape which offers both violence and grace. In the "three-panel" story "Rodin's The Hand of God," a father must nurse his distraught daughter back to sanity after her car flips off the highway into the Madison River and her two children are killed. One day, after leaving for work, he decides to turn around and check in on her, say "I love you" one more time:

Far away, he spots her blue Ford. It is broad daylight and the garden hose looks so simple and obvious, he starts to cry. He speeds and halts and whispers to himself as he lifts her body, light, feathery in his arms, light as a sparrow or whip-poor-will, a hummingbird, small corpus made of sunlight or vapor. Mercy, he pleads, and he speeds in his car through traffic lights and signs, her body limp on the black leather of the backseat, her white face whiter than the faces of the silent performers he'd seen in Japan or the bleached buffalo skull he'd found as a boy with his father--like a huge shard of prehistoric bone--white, whiter than the white sun over the Spanish Peaks that shines as it does on him and her, on the Crazies near Big Timber and west to the Sapphires, east to the Beartooths, and north, far north to the Missions, all the way to Glacier.

Notice how softly Ray moves us from that white face in the back of the car out into the wide horizons of Montana's endless sky. Man is not just a tiny figure on the landscape; at times he is the landscape. And, through violence, the land reclaims the fragile human beings. In the exquisite story "When We Rise," which is dominated by the image of two men attempting impossible basketball free throws outdoors on a snowy night, one of those men, Shale, remembers the accident which claimed his brother Weston, a rising collegiate hoopster. Ray moves from the sublime to the tragic in the space of one paragraph:

There is a highway, the interstate east through Idaho where dawn is a light from the border on, from the passes, Fourth of July, and Lookout, a light that illumines and carries far but remains unseen until he closes his eyes and he is cresting the apex under the blue "Welcome to Montana" sign, riding the downslant to a wilderness more oceanic than earthlike, a manifold vastness of timber, the trees in wide swells and up again in lifts that ascend in swaths of shadow and the shadow of shadows until the woodland stops and the vault of sky becomes morning. Weston, alone and in their father's car, sped from the edge of that highway in darkness and blew out the metal guardrail and warped the steel so it reached after the car like a strange hand through which the known world passes, the heavy dark Chevelle like a shot star, headlights that put beams in the night until the chassis turned and the car became an untethered creature that fell and broke itself on the valley floor. The moment sticks in Shale's mind, always has, no one having seen anything but the aftermath and silence, and down inside the wreckage a pale arm from the window, almost translucent, like a thread leading back to what was forsaken.

The natural world in American Masculine is freighted with heavy symbolism. In Montana, we call the sky "big," but in these stories, it is often a battlefield between dark and light. Ray uses the sun, the moon and the stars as strong metaphor (sometimes too insistently strong) to illustrate the wars cannonading within each of his characters. Here the sky and land are so beautiful they make your teeth ache, as seen in this passage from "In the Half-Light":

Devin’s father pointed out the window, east toward Bozeman.
“Look at that,” he whispered.
Above the clouds the Bridgers stood clear, cut in blacks and grays, taking up much of the sky. Behind them was the scarlet horizon. While he drove his father would steal long looks. The sky's blood gathered and went out. The morning turned Devin’s face gold.
“Nothing like it, is there?” his father said.
They topped a broad rise. The truck moved from shadow to sun. The land opened wide. To the south, mountains and fields were free of clouds, open now under a sweep of sky. The road banked down and left, and the mountains parted. The river appeared again, emerald, flared by sunshine as it blazed around an arm of land.

I will confess that not all of the stories in American Masculine held my attention as tight to the page as "The Great Divide," "Rodin's The Hand of God," or "When We Rise." There are moments when the prose became so dense with meaning and weighted symbolism the words went grey on the page and my attention wandered. I think, however, this is less a fault of Ray's than it is mine and the way I let distraction pull me away. American Masculine is packed tight with prose that borders on poetry and it is up to us to bring as much care and devotion to the act of reading that Ray did to the act of writing. Even in his weakest moments, the author strives to convey a clarion call, waking us from our slumber with messages of hope, grace and forgiveness. It's up to his audience to answer that call. We, all of us, need to be like monks devoted to the holiness of reading.

This review originally appeared at The Quivering Pen blog.… (plus d'informations)

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davidabrams | 1 autre critique | Sep 12, 2011 |

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