Lyrically written 'Red Rover' a compelling read

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Aug 26, 2007 | by Susan Whitney Deseret Morning News

Deirdre McNamer's new novel is lyrical, in its structure as well as in its sentences. The plot rolls through time, with decades receding and returning like the tide.

McNamer begins with two young brothers riding their horses through the Sweet Grass Hills of Montana in 1927. The next chapter finds one of the brothers in peril during the Second World War. A few chapters later, it is 2003. Then its 1927 again.

As readers, we come to care about a dozen different characters. We see them through each other's eyes, see them in their old age, then as their younger selves on the day Charles Lindbergh flew over their tiny town. The title, "Red Rover," refers to the children's game, where you run full tilt and maybe you break through and maybe you don't. Maybe you hit hard against your neighbors' interlocked arms and you don't go anywhere at all.

The book succeeds by telling a compellingly clear story, allowing us to hear a variety of voices -- while at the same time hinting at the sad and hidden parts of all those lives.

McNamer actually began "Red Rover" thinking it would be a biography, a factual exploration of her own family's sadness. Her uncle, who had been an FBI agent, died mysteriously in 1946.

She began her research seven years ago. (Back in the days when Americans could still view their government's records, she notes.) She used the Freedom of Information Act to get access to the FBI's investigation of her uncle's death -- and she learned the official investigation was inconclusive.

McNamer realized she would never know if the FBI had more information. She would never know why the coroner told the newspaper one story but wrote something different on the death certificate. The coroner was dead by the time McNamer started asking questions.

So her book began as a search for the truth and ended up being almost entirely fiction.

McNamer came through Salt Lake City earlier this week on a book tour. At the King's English Bookstore, she took questions after her reading and kept on answering them as she signed books.

Several readers wanted to know how a fictional resolution to his brother's death affected her father. McNamer said, "It did matter some."

In order for fiction to succeed, she explained, it must amplify. A good novel makes life more complex. As she wrote, a small sliver of her family's truth became a frame for her to use, something on which she could hang all the other stories.

In reality her uncle's death was not resolved but she hopes her fiction amplifies his life.

McNamer's parents are both 89, living in Missoula where she and her husband also live. McNamer grew up in Cutthroat, got an MFA from the University of Montana and teaches there now.

She wishes she wrote more quickly, she said. Having been a journalist for 10 years, she thought she might have mastered a short and quick form of writing. Instead, she found herself laboring slowly over this, her fourth novel.

There was a 3 1/2-year period where she taught only in the afternoons and spent her mornings in her little downtown office -- an office without a phone or Internet connection. She made rules for herself: "Write four pages or write for four hours."

She enjoyed the goofiness of her Rules of 4, and started coming up with more. Such as "Foreswear!" She foreswore staying up late or drinking too many beers or doing anything that might make it harder for her to get up in time to write.

Because her novel needed to be set in several decades, she taught a class on time, and she and her students studied the way time was used in 10 different novels, including "Madame Bovary," "Open Secrets" and "In Cold Blood," in which, she notes, "the china is kind of rattling long before the murders."

McNamer also told her Utah readers, "I'm interested in intersections." She began this novel knowing how a coroner's statement -- a possibly false statement -- had caused her grandparents such anguish.

"As a writer, I'm interested in how even people we don't like or don't admire have their moments. A moment that changes you."

Her book is full of intersections. But her daily life is also full of intersections, she said, because she lives in a state that has less than a million people, and her grandparents on both sides were homesteaders in Montana. She is always finding connections.

Just this summer she ran into an old family friend, a man who said he remembers her uncle often. He wishes McNamer could have known her uncle, the man said. She would have loved him.

E-mail: susan@desnews.com