Product Description

Annie Dillard has called him “one of our finest writers.” Jane Smiley has declared his voice “prophetic.”  Now, at long last—after two collections of stories, another two of essays, and the heralded memoir A Hole in the Sky—William Kittredge gives us his first novel: an epic that stretches over the twentieth century, from the settlers, cowboys, and gamblers who opened up this country to the landholders and politicians who ran it.

Rossie Benasco’s horseback existence begins when he’s fifteen and culminates in a thousand-mile drive of more than two hundred head of horses through the Rockies into Calgary, through Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, across virgin wilderness, failed homesteads, ghost towns, squatters’ camps, and Indian settlements. It’s a journey that leads him, ultimately, to Eliza Stevenson and a love so powerful that his vocational aimlessness is focused only by his desire to spend his life with her: whether on her family ranch in the Bitterroot, which will prove their best refuge from a century fraught with war and civil strife, or on sojourns in Hawaii and Guam during World War II, or in the horse-trading business in California, or on the campaign trail throughout Montana.

A novel rich with landscapes and characters, The Willow Field chronicles a way of life nearly extinct at the novel’s beginning and surviving only in memory upon its close at century’s end. And as these people pivot between the ghosts of the old frontier and the modern world that engulfs them—from the uprooted lives of the Blackfeet tribes left listless and betrayed to the ravages of war, McCarthyism, urban riots, and insidious land development—the perennial imperatives of ambition, responsibility, and love prove as vital as ever, revealed as they are with the conviction, humor, and humanity for which Kittredge has long been acclaimed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #902899 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-26
• Released on: 2006-09-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Memoirist and story writer Kittredge's first novel (after The Nature of Generosity and Hole in the Sky) tells the life story of Rossie Benasco, the ornery son of a Reno, Nev., casino pit boss who, at age 15 in the early 1930s, takes work as a "wrango boy" at a Nevada ranch owned by retired rodeo legend Slivers Flynn. Rossie's intimate relationship with Slivers's daughter causes Slivers to give Rossie a choice: run a couple hundred horses to Calgary or stay and "have a mess of redheaded kids." Rossie chooses the thousand-mile trek and, at trail's end, falls for Eliza Stevenson, the beautiful and pregnant (the father "went batshit" and is in prison for assault) daughter of a Scottish businessman. Eliza's father deeds the family's Montana farm to Rossie to nudge him into marrying Eliza, and the couple seal their relationship with the birth of a son and a wedding. Kittredge moves Rossie along with a compelling confidence: Rossie learns to run a farm, watches his son mature and adopts an orphaned girl before joining the Marine Corps in December 1941; he is shot by a fellow soldier and spends most of his tour working as a supply clerk. Years later, his children grown, Rossie gets involved in local and state politics, which proves to be as perilous as the Pacific theater. Kittredge balances earthy dialogue with lyrical prose to create a memorable evocation of the American west. (Oct. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
The opening chapters of William Kittredge's new Western are so seductive you'll want to strap on spurs and light out for the territory. The Willow Field spans most of the 20th century and describes a way of life that hung on for decades after the rest of the country slipped into the effete and poisonous modern age. But the most surprising thing about Kittredge's novel is that it's his first. After dozens of essays and short stories and his memoir, Hole in the Sky, it's easy to imagine that you must have read a novel by this 74-year-old writer before. In fact, he and Steven M. Krauzer, a colleague at the University of Montana, wrote nine Westerns under the pseudonym "Owen Rountree" in the 1980s, but this time he's riding solo under his own name and calling the outing his debut.

At the center of this epic is Rossie Benasco. We meet him at 15, working as a "wrango boy on the Neversweat, one of the vast Nevada empire ranches." He's dropped out of school, with the approval of his loving but remarkably tolerant parents, and shacked up with his boss's daughter. Together they enjoy the kind of energetic, ever-ready, guilt-free sex that guys get to have in men's magazines. She's a good cook, too. It's enough to make you weep for the Old West.

But soon enough Rossie feels anxious about settling and getting stuck with a bunch of kids. "What I wonder," he tells his mom, "is how I'm going to amount to anything." And so he abandons his first love -- just for the summer, he tells her -- and hires on with a team to drive 257 horses 1,000 miles to Calgary. Told in a series of gorgeous, jagged-edged anecdotes, it's the ultimate macho adventure: seven weeks of hard horseback riding, eating over an open fire and sleeping under the stars.

This long trek is also a showcase for the startling beauty of Kittredge's prose and his knowledge of the West: "A long day of backland roads across Nevada and into the Oregon deserts followed, past sage-covered ridges with dark mahogany brush up where snows collected in winter drifts and not a house or a traveler or any other person. . . . Mallard drakes flew up as the horse herd jostled through a brokendown gateway to the water, the birds circling and then returning to the tiny weave of desert swamp."

In Calgary, Rossie meets a strange, wildly independent young woman named Eliza, who, like all the women in this novel, can't wait to get Rossie in bed (or field or creek or barn). She's pregnant by an incarcerated Indian, but she steals Rossie's heart, anyhow. "What she's like," he tells a friend, "is there's a field of horses, and one good one, and any damned fool can see the difference." Who couldn't get lucky with lines like that?

Thoroughly whipped, Rossie pursues Eliza back to her parents' house and discovers that, while the rest of the country wallows in the Depression, her family is extraordinarily wealthy. Amid the vast plains of Montana, they live in an oasis of wit and sophistication that only money could enable. Her father's "talk was often nothing Rossie could understand," Kittredge writes, "particularly when it careened into the vagaries of literature and philosophy."

Until this point, the novel seems committed to the tale of a young cowboy "going off to be his own man, to have his own style," but at Eliza's house the epic adventure loses its hi-yo momentum. Rossie tries to decide if he's selling out by staying with Eliza and accepting her parents' largess. "Are these people something I could amount to?" he wonders. "I'm trying to stick with her without turning into a fool who fetches and carries." Rossie can feel himself being domesticated, and that alarms him. Arguing with her one day, he blurts out, "All I want . . . is you and horses and nobody ordering me around," but in these languid chapters that simple longing just fades away. Though all this is sensitively and intricately drawn, the pacing is bovine, and readers mesmerized by the first section of the novel are likely to bolt.

Toward the end, the story suddenly picks up, only to gallop too quickly through the rest of Rossie's life (marine, gubernatorial candidate, grandfather). Kittredge has clearly switched horses on us again and decided to pursue a spotty survey of 20th-century history and land-management issues that would read better in one of his essays. It's a disappointing diffusion of the book's initial energy and beauty, its promise to discover "what could heal the abrasions suffered and delivered while going off to be your own man with horses."

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Rossie Benasco, a young man in Reno in the 1930s, turns his back on school and family and goes off "to be his own man with horses." But women get in the way. That premise stands behind much of western literature. Sometimes it's expressed in the formulaic terms of genre fiction, and other times, as in Kittredge's luminous first novel, it opens up an exploration of the magnetic fields that draw people together and push them apart. Kittredge's multigenerational saga begins with a stunning set piece--a classic horse drive, more than 200 head, from Nevada to Calgary. Rossie, a veteran ranch hand but still barely 20, signs on for the drive as a way of breaking ties with a girl and winds up forging even stronger ties with another girl, Eliza Stevenson, the unmarried but pregnant daughter of a rancher in Montana's Bitterroot Mountains. "We could be it, entirely it," Eliza says shortly after she meets Rossie, and as we watch their lives unfold, from the Depression through World War II and on into the 1960s, we realize that this strong-willed woman was both right and wrong. Like Birkin and Ursula in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, Rossie and Eliza are "entirely it," but--fiery individuals both--they are also in perpetual conflict, cherishing their union just as they struggle not to be consumed by the other. This transcendent love story is at the heart of Kittredge's novel, but it is set against not one but two imposing landscapes--the Bitterroot and the Nevada desert, both of which demand their own allegiance from the characters' minds and hearts. Readers of Kittredge's acclaimed memoirs of growing up in the West, including the classic A Hole in the Sky (1994), have been anticipating his first novel for years. "Go to horses with no rush," Rossie's mentor explains to him, "but no fucking around, that's the deal." Kittredge knows that deal, and he gets it exactly right. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

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. When trailing the horse herd through Oregon on the way to Calgary, how could Steens Mountain be to the east? A little later, the description of the horse drive jumps from the entry into Montana at Monida Pass all the way to Choteau. That is a gutless thing for the writer to do; there are a lot of miles and a lot of difficulty in that gap. In addition, the timeline from the beginning of the drive until Rossie arrives back in the Flathead Valley is not credible.

One last criticism concerns three vulgar words. Remove them and the novel would be pages shorter. Westerners used such words very sparingly during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and almost never in mixed company. Their frequent usage damages the authenticity of story.

Readers of novels usually try to discern the messages or concepts the writer intends to convey. There is an interesting sentence near the back of the book: "People in Montana know what happened to the Indians, and they see that it's happening to them." Much of this book is about protecting what is wonderful about Montana from being ruined by people who don't take time to recognize those values. A connected concern is those people who move to Montana and bring along the very habits that made where they came from inferior to Montana.

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. We are immediately involved intimately in the life of Rossie Benasco as he progresses from a "wrango boy" of 15, living horseback on the hardscrabble ranches of Nevada and California, to a well-respected man of wealth and power, an influential landowner in the starkly beautiful Bitterroot Mountains of Montana.

"The Willow Field" is full of hard lives and lives of luxury, loves and losses, Kittredge's own convictions, and perhaps most importantly of all, a panoramic view of the American West as it actually was in the setting of the early 1930s.

Definitely a marvelous read, one I found difficult to put down, and impossible to get out of my mind afterward. Kittredge has established himself firmly as a first-class novelist with this passionate book about Rossie Benasco and the Montana so beloved by them both.

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 children

William 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.

Harriet Klausner