It is not good that man should be alone, and that goes double for folksingers. Even if you’re writing original songs, folk music comes out of a dialogue between an artist and the people. If you isolate yourself from the world you’re supposed to be writing from, you’re going to start to lose your voice. We’ve seen it happen.

I thought about this last year when Josh Ritter played a series of pandemic-era solo shows, live-streamed from his Brooklyn apartment. Dubbed the Silo Sessions (in reference to what, for my money, might be the best song he’s written), these performances showed how an empty room can make all the difference. If a tree falling in the middle of the forest makes a sound, it’s a hollow sound.

Unfortunately, this brings us to Ritter’s new novel about “the last days of the lumberjacks.” The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All is Ritter’s attempt to return to his Idaho roots, but this western train never really leaves the Barclays Center station. It’s a book less inhabited than haunted by its rough-sketch characters and sound-and-fury scenery: the towering pines of the northern forest falling to an audience of translucent ghosts.

It’s an interesting failure, though, and it’s worth thinking about what Ritter was trying to do with this book. The thing that struck me the most was a pattern of doubleness. His previous novel, Bright’s Passage, drew comparisons to the work of Cormac McCarthy, and if you squint, you can make out that resemblance here too. McCarthy, like Ritter, is something of a lyricist, and some of his most memorable effects come from the juxtaposition of his own operatic narration with the plain speech of his characters.

Here’s McCarthy in All the Pretty Horses:

They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.

It’s fixin to come a goodn, said Rawlins.

And here’s Ritter in The Great Glorious, Etc.:

Good Christ on crackers but he was a huge, great, big fucker. It was a wonder he’d fit in our store at all. The man’s hair was black as licorice and hung to his ears like a cavalryman on the cover of one of my father’s Custer battle books. His eyes were green as sunlight through alder leaves, and his Adam’s apple looked like a half-swallowed fist in his throat.

Each passage offers a similar study in contrast. On a stylistic level, McCarthy succeeds where Ritter fails, because McCarthy remembers that while some cowboys are poets, even cowboy-poets know better than to put “huge, great, big fucker” and “sunlight through alder leaves” in the same paragraph. Choosing to narrate his novel in the first person, Ritter crams his own rhetorical flights of fancy into the mouth of Weldon Applegate, a character otherwise written as an arch-unromantic and general philistine. The tonal whiplash is a constant annoyance.

But I’m convinced that it’s purposeful. Ritter means something by having Weldon rhapsodize about the woods and the jacks and the violence they worked on one another and then promptly subverting his own rhapsodies. And this pattern of doubleness at the level of language is itself doubled at the level of the novel’s plot.