It seemed unlikely that there would ever be other writers as good as Silas House or Kent Haruf, but there are a few. One is Mark Spragg; his latest book is “An Unfinished Life.” It blew me away.
There is a symbiosis between the high plains and Appalachia. These three writers, unwittingly or not, have found a deep connectedness, unspoken, unwritten, yet so apparent that you could plop the characters from one book down into the setting of the other without a hitch. Perhaps that is true of all good novels about the tragedies and triumphs of the people of rural America, yet few if any have been so perfectly realized on paper.
From the first words in this flawless story, we are rooting for Jean Gilkyson, fool that she is, and her young daughter Griff. Jean was blessed, or cursed, with good looks and once had a good marriage. It ended when the car she was driving crashed, killing her husband. Life would never be the same. Her father-in-law blamed her for the devastating loss of his son, and out she went, like garbage, taking Griff with her.
What a life. One rotten man after another, one ratty trailer after another, one black eye and smashed face after another. An endless chain of misery with no way out. Griff, for all the world right out of “Paper Moon,” keeps a list of all the things she hates about her mother, along with a few little doo-dads close to her heart, along for the ride.
When Jean’s latest boyfri/files/storyimages/Roy goes over the line once too often, Jean swears off, packs their pitiful belongings, and she and Griff take off in the 1984 Chevy Impala with 147,000 miles and a Florida license plate from a lover or so ago still on it. They head west out of Iowa.
It isn’t an easy trip and their destination is but a fuzzy idea in Jean’s head. Ishawooa, Wyo., still is home, but her family is all dead. Only her father-in-law, Einer, is left. He would never forgive or forget, but he might take them in. He is, after all, Griff’s grandfather.
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