{"id":3894,"date":"2021-09-08T17:20:33","date_gmt":"2021-09-08T17:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=3894"},"modified":"2021-09-08T17:25:09","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T17:25:09","slug":"the-great-glorious-goddamn-of-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2021\/09\/08\/the-great-glorious-goddamn-of-it-all\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Josh Ritter\u2019s Own Private Idaho<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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The songwriter\u2019s new novel goes looking for his roots, but it fails to leave the safety of civilization behind.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Charlie Clark
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It is not good that man should be alone, and that goes double for folksingers. Even if you\u2019re writing original songs, folk music comes out of a dialogue between an artist and the people. If you isolate yourself from the world you\u2019re supposed to be writing from, you\u2019re going to start to lose your voice. We\u2019ve seen it happen.<\/p>

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\u2019s written<\/a>), 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\u2019s a hollow sound.<\/p>

Unfortunately, this brings us to Ritter\u2019s new novel about \u201cthe last days of the lumberjacks.\u201d The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All <\/em>is Ritter\u2019s attempt to return to his Idaho roots, but this western train never really leaves the Barclays Center station. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>

It\u2019s an interesting failure, though, and it\u2019s 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\u2019s Passage<\/em>, 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.<\/p>

Here\u2019s McCarthy in All the Pretty Horses<\/em>:<\/p>

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.<\/em><\/p>

It\u2019s fixin to come a goodn, said Rawlins.<\/em><\/p>

And here\u2019s Ritter in The Great Glorious<\/em>, Etc.<\/em>:<\/p>

Good Christ on crackers but he was a huge, great, big fucker. It was a wonder he\u2019d fit in our store at all. The man\u2019s hair was black as licorice and hung to his ears like a cavalryman on the cover of one of my father\u2019s Custer battle books. His eyes were green as sunlight through alder leaves, and his Adam\u2019s apple looked like a half-swallowed fist in his throat.<\/em><\/p>

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 \u201chuge, great, big fucker\u201d and \u201csunlight through alder leaves\u201d 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.<\/p>

But I\u2019m convinced that it\u2019s 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\u2019s plot.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Many there are that have the experience and miss the meaning.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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In the frame story, Weldon is 99 years old, reflecting on his coming of age in an Idaho lumber town, 86 years earlier. Knowing how suspicious this looks, Weldon defends his reliability as a narrator: \u201cMemory has a way of growing things, of improving them. The hardships get harder, the good times get better and the whole damn arc of a life take on a mystic glow that only memory can give it.\u201d But, he assures us, these particular memories are among the exceptions, the ones that \u201cremain crystal clear when everything else in life is clouding over, turning to long shadows and receding into the mist of fucking unreality and tall tale.\u201d Weldon wants us to take him seriously, even literally.<\/p>

The fantastic story Weldon has to tell is of his conflict with Linden Laughlin, the aforementioned \u201chuge, great, big fucker\u201d: \u201cLinden Laughlin could kick the ceiling with his spiked boots. He was seven feet tall and had three rows of teeth. He could bite through a hatchet handle, not like he ever used a hatchet. Linden Laughlin\u2019s ax could chop down trees all by itself.\u201d But Linden is more than a sinister Paul Bunyan\u2014and here again, there are real echoes of Cormac McCarthy: like Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men<\/em> or, especially, like Judge Holden of Blood Meridian<\/em>, Linden appears to be more than mortal, \u201ca monster\u2026 his belly filled by the deaths of lumberjacks since before anyone could say,\u201d an incarnation of the wilderness and its arbitrary malice. It\u2019s said that \u201che can read minds, he can see across the world, he\u2019s as strong as ten men.\u201d And indeed, over the course of the novel, we see Linden do several of these things.<\/p>

More importantly, Weldon sees him do several of these things, and by his own account, his contest with Linden at age 13 is the defining episode of his long life. So how has this brush with the sublime and the supernatural shaped his subsequent 86 years?<\/p>

Yesterday afternoon I was drinking at the Brothers Swede, watching the soaps\u2026<\/em><\/p>

I mostly eat canned food\u2026<\/em><\/p>

I\u2019m not some fucking sage hermit at one with the Universe or anything like that\u2026<\/em><\/p>

So much for Weldon\u2019s life at 99, but we also hear practically nothing about his life after age 21. He\u2019s essentially been Rip Van Winkled by beer and daytime TV. This is the subversive, discordant doubleness of the novel\u2019s language writ large.<\/p>

At 13, Weldon goes to the woods, and sees the great glorious goddamn of it all. But at 99 he is wholly unawed, unthreatened, faithless. It\u2019s not that such things can\u2019t happen. Many there are that have the experience and miss the meaning. But what, in turn, is the meaning of a hardboiled folk hero? What is the meaning of this gold-to-lead alchemy, where the Yes of transcendence is immediately swallowed up in the No of cynicism?<\/p>

The fantasy is that you can take the trip\u2014civilization into wilderness, modernity into faerie, Brooklyn to Idaho\u2014and stay a tourist: a buffered, isolated self, just browsing the wares of a higher time, safely ensconced in your secular self-satisfaction. Time to leave the silo, Mr. Ritter.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Charlie Clark<\/strong>\u00a0is a writer and retractor<\/a>. He lives in New Hampshire.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All<\/strong> was published by HarperCollins on September 7, 2021. <\/em>Fare Forward thanks the publisher for providing an advance copy for our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy on their website here<\/a>. <\/em>
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Josh Ritter\u2019s new novel goes looking for his roots, but it fails to leave the safety of civilization behind. 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