Sunday, October 12, 2003

By Rebecca Sodergren

Ivan Doig tells epic stories. Maybe it's the backdrop of the sweeping Montana frontier where his stories are set. The land is larger than life, so the people and situations seem so, too.

	"Prairie Nocturne" By Ivan Doig Scribner ($26)

With this novel, he revisits his famed "Montana Trilogy," the best and most epic of which is the beautiful "Dancing at the Rascal Fair."

Doig picks up on the lives of minor characters from that novel -- the Williamson family, the greedy cattle operation that tries to buy the prairie out from under the honest, hardscrabble homesteaders, and Susan Duff, then a mere schoolgirl child of one of those homesteaders.

Now Susan is 40 and a voice teacher in Helena, and the Williamsons have effectively accomplished their goal of scooping up all the property in sight. Despite the enmity between Susan's now-dead father and the cattle barons, we discover Susan has had an affair with Wes Williamson, a war hero, one-time gubernatorial candidate and partner in the ranch empire.

When we meet her, it's four years after the affair. Wes lets himself into her house with his old key, but not for a tryst. He comes to ask Susan to take on the best vocal student she's ever trained.

Problem is, the potential student is a black man. And she's a white woman. And it's 1920.

Wes proposes moving Susan from Helena to her family's old homestead, where she can train the young man, Monty Rathbun, a Williamson ranch hand, in relative privacy.

Despite her sharp-tongued stubbornness, Susan accepts because Monty's voice really is something special, but maybe also because she still has feelings for Wes.

They end up meeting the full wrath of the Ku Klux Klan.

These three characters and their relationships form the heart of the novel. Bossy, indomitable Susan is the one who really keeps the Pygmalion project going; she refuses to yield even when the Klan threatens her and Monty.

Wes is harder to read, shuffling between motivations that we suspect confuse even him:

Did he set up these lessons as a scheme to stage a showdown with the Klan he's always wanted to conquer? Or to get back together with Susan? Or to assuage some guilt over his family's relationship with the Rathbuns?

Monty, perhaps, is the most intriguing of all. He dwells on his mysterious past, when his once-respected, war-decorated father disappeared one day. He's haunted by this, and it comes out in his singing.

At times he displays fierce courage in the face of the Klan, at other times he would rather abandon the voice he's struggled to train and be the common laborer he's expected to be.

But the novel, like Doig's others, is at the same time larger than these characters. It's a sweeping story of racial divides and the effects of war -- the types of themes that drive great literature.

But is it great literature?

In the end, I have to say no. It's definitely not "Dancing at the Rascal Fair," which is a hauntingly beautiful story that ultimately rings true.

"Prairie Nocturne" contains many great scenes, but something doesn't quite ring true, particularly in Susan, who clomps around in haughty (though likeable) independence, then suddenly develops a tender side.

Yet a book can fall short of being great literature and still be worthwhile, complex and intriguing. This book is all of those things.

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