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A review by book_concierge
The Bartender's Tale by Ivan Doig
4.0
From the book jacket: Tom Harry has a venerable bar called the Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge of the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom also has a son named Rusty, whose mother deserted them both years ago. The pair make an odd kind of family, with the bar their true home, but they manage just fine. Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when, and her beatnik daughter, Francine.
My reactions:
Ivan Doig has a way of exploring the everyday events of a person’s life and making them seem epic in scope. In this marvelous novel he gives us a precocious, if worried, twelve-year-old narrator who hero worships his father. Rusty is a great observer and while his imagination can get ahead of the facts, he can also be pretty astute when judging character. I loved reading about these two and the family unit they create, as well as the many townsfolk who populate Gros Ventre, the surrounding area and especially the Medicine Lodge. As Rusty relates the happenings of the summer of 1960, I came to love his father just about as much as Rusty did. Despite having a young narrator who clearly worships his father, Doig manages to give us a balanced view of Tom Harry – father, bartender, confessor, business owner, a man with flaws and who is trying mightily to make the best of the deck he’s been dealt.
The location is practically a character unto itself, and Doig does a marvelous job of painting the picture for us:
The highly polished surface of the classic bar, as dark as wood can get. In back of the bar the colossal oak breakfront, as ornate as it was high and long, displaying all known brands of liquor. A lofty pressed-tin ceiling the color of risen cream. Walls of restful deep green. Original plank-wide floorboards as substantial as a ship’s decking.
I had never been in a museum, but the colossal back room of the Medicine Lodge immediately fixed that. The two-story space was like some enormous attic that had settled to the ground floor under the weight of its treasures.
The outside hadn’t tasted paint for a good many years, while the interior was well kept but as old-fashioned as the time it was built, with a dreary parlor and a milkmaid room off the kitchen and those high ceilings of the Victorian era that defied rationale and heating system alike.
The Rocky Mountains practically came down from the roof of the continent to meet us. The highest parts lived up to their name in solid rock, bluish-gray cliffs like the mightiest castle walls imaginable, with timber thick and dark beneath the morning sky boundless beyond.
And the way he describes the people!
My father was a figure to behold, by any standard. The long, big-shouldered body, as if the whole world was meant to look up to him the way I did. The skunk streak in his black hair; expressive, thick eyebrows … But it was the lines in his face that told the most about him. … The man was etched with the Thirties, with that deeply creased survivor’s look so many times photographed as the image of the Depression generation.
Zoe possessed deep brown eyes that were hard to look away from, and she had an olive-skinned complexion that no doubt suntanned nice as toast. … She was so skinny – call it thin, to be polite – that she reminded me of those famished waifs in news photos of DP refugee camps.
The traveling secretary was a chubby young man with the hearty attitude that so often substitutes for genuine ability; if I didn’t miss my guess, he was the son or nephew of someone in the team’s management.
The woman was, according to the saying I had never fully appreciated until then, an eyeful. In lavender slacks that had no slack between the fabric and her and a creamy blouse also snugly filled, the vision of womanhood providing us that slinky smile was not what is standardly thought of as beautiful, yet here were three males of various ages who could not stop staring at her.
This is frequently listed as #10 in the Two Medicine Country series. But calling this a series is somewhat of a misnomer. Yes, the books all take place in Two Medicine Country and there are some characters who appear in more than one book, but these are mostly stand-alone novels. THIS book definitely stands alone.
My reactions:
Ivan Doig has a way of exploring the everyday events of a person’s life and making them seem epic in scope. In this marvelous novel he gives us a precocious, if worried, twelve-year-old narrator who hero worships his father. Rusty is a great observer and while his imagination can get ahead of the facts, he can also be pretty astute when judging character. I loved reading about these two and the family unit they create, as well as the many townsfolk who populate Gros Ventre, the surrounding area and especially the Medicine Lodge. As Rusty relates the happenings of the summer of 1960, I came to love his father just about as much as Rusty did. Despite having a young narrator who clearly worships his father, Doig manages to give us a balanced view of Tom Harry – father, bartender, confessor, business owner, a man with flaws and who is trying mightily to make the best of the deck he’s been dealt.
The location is practically a character unto itself, and Doig does a marvelous job of painting the picture for us:
The highly polished surface of the classic bar, as dark as wood can get. In back of the bar the colossal oak breakfront, as ornate as it was high and long, displaying all known brands of liquor. A lofty pressed-tin ceiling the color of risen cream. Walls of restful deep green. Original plank-wide floorboards as substantial as a ship’s decking.
I had never been in a museum, but the colossal back room of the Medicine Lodge immediately fixed that. The two-story space was like some enormous attic that had settled to the ground floor under the weight of its treasures.
The outside hadn’t tasted paint for a good many years, while the interior was well kept but as old-fashioned as the time it was built, with a dreary parlor and a milkmaid room off the kitchen and those high ceilings of the Victorian era that defied rationale and heating system alike.
The Rocky Mountains practically came down from the roof of the continent to meet us. The highest parts lived up to their name in solid rock, bluish-gray cliffs like the mightiest castle walls imaginable, with timber thick and dark beneath the morning sky boundless beyond.
And the way he describes the people!
My father was a figure to behold, by any standard. The long, big-shouldered body, as if the whole world was meant to look up to him the way I did. The skunk streak in his black hair; expressive, thick eyebrows … But it was the lines in his face that told the most about him. … The man was etched with the Thirties, with that deeply creased survivor’s look so many times photographed as the image of the Depression generation.
Zoe possessed deep brown eyes that were hard to look away from, and she had an olive-skinned complexion that no doubt suntanned nice as toast. … She was so skinny – call it thin, to be polite – that she reminded me of those famished waifs in news photos of DP refugee camps.
The traveling secretary was a chubby young man with the hearty attitude that so often substitutes for genuine ability; if I didn’t miss my guess, he was the son or nephew of someone in the team’s management.
The woman was, according to the saying I had never fully appreciated until then, an eyeful. In lavender slacks that had no slack between the fabric and her and a creamy blouse also snugly filled, the vision of womanhood providing us that slinky smile was not what is standardly thought of as beautiful, yet here were three males of various ages who could not stop staring at her.
This is frequently listed as #10 in the Two Medicine Country series. But calling this a series is somewhat of a misnomer. Yes, the books all take place in Two Medicine Country and there are some characters who appear in more than one book, but these are mostly stand-alone novels. THIS book definitely stands alone.