Bucking the Sun: A Novel

Maud Casey

Here's a book for ardent fans of big, strapping American novels told in muscled prose -- but not, perhaps, a book for the rest of us. Ivan Doig's fifth novel, like his earlier work, deals largely with man's struggle against nature -- in this case, the building of the monumental Fort Peck Dam (a WPA project) over the Missouri River in the 1930s. We're quickly introduced to randy family of men called the Duffs and their "bridge widows" in the dam town of Wheeler, Montana. There's fillmaster Owen, the encumbered older brother, Darius, a Marxist uncle on the lam, a taxidancer named Proxy who could dance "the dimes out of the joes," and Rosellen, a struggling writer, to name but a few. Fort Peck Dam was a mix of engineering triumphs and ig, dramatic mud slides, and so it is with the Duffs -- childbirth, familial love and strife, near-death experiences with fire and water, and a mysterious, lusty affair at the narrative's core.

The problem is that it's sometimes hard to tell these characters apart. Each uses expressions like "Christ in his nighty" and "fiddlesticks." This wouldn't be so bad except that they have similar, snappy responses, even in the height of crisis. This prose has a tendency to swagger, sometimes even donning cowboy boots as it struts its way into the Montana sunset. Early on, "Rosellen was having the chicken and dumplings, Kate the ham steak, and winter was having Fort Peck for supper." And sometimes Doig's writing stumbles or just plain falls down in those big boots: "She studied him like a skeptic buying wild honey in molasses country." Other times, Doig simply seems lazy: "Charlene was madder than a wet hen or any other comparison that could be drawn."

The really interesting story here concerns the construction of the dam and its impact on the Missouri River and the surrounding landscape. Doig is thorough. He knows his history and provides striking images of ancient buffalo skulls popping up in the dam water, the Duffs' Scottish ancestors lashing themselves to a ship to keep from falling into stormy waters, and FDR's sad, shriveled legs as he delivered his speech at Fort Peck. But ultimately, it's slow going. If you were a Duff, it might put you "in a mood a crocodile would have spat at." -- Salon

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As in Doig's Montana trilogy (Dancing at the Rascal Fair, etc.), here American history forms the vivid backdrop for a flinty family drama. Once again, a group of hardheaded, Scotch-descended Montanans struggle with each other and with nature, this time during the building of the Fort Peck Dam from 1933 to 1938. Hugh Duff hasn't spoken to his eldest son, Owen, since the young man abandoned the family farm to study engineering. Owen is hired to oversee Fort Peck's earth fill just as his father learns that the dam will flood their fields. Hugh simmers, but his wife, Meg, and their twin sons, reckless Bruce and sensible Neil, are happy to get jobs on the New Deal project, though Neil asserts his independence by "bucking the sun" (driving into its head-on rays) for his after-hours trucking business. The brothers' wives-Owen's socially ambitious Charlene; her sister Rosellen, an aspiring writer married to Neil; and Bruce's terse, tough-minded Kate-increase the volatility of the Duff family mix of love and loyalty tempering profound differences of personality and belief. Among the other well-drawn characters is Hugh's Marxist brother Darious, a striking portrait of political extremism. Doig's trademark, minutely detailed evocations of physical labor are present here, as is a bravura description of a disastrous collapse of the unfinished dam. The novel is more plot-heavy than Doig's previous work: the mysterious deaths that bookend the main story are contrived, and the narrative often whipsaws among various Duffs. Not quite as magical as English Creek, but much better than the sketchy Ride with Me, Mariah Montana, this is still vintage Doig.

Library Journal

Doig begins this saga with adultery and death, then moves backward to examine the causes. Just as the building of the mammoth Fort Peck Dam transforms the Montana countryside, it radically alters the lives of its Depression-era inhabitants. In particular, members of the Duff clan abandon subsistence farming and move to the construction boomtowns. There a father, three brothers, and their wives confront the task of building the largest earthen dam in the world, brave the dangers of such labor, and battle among themselves. Doig has published memoirs of his Montana youth (National Book Award finalist This House of Sky, LJ 9/15/78) and a novel trilogy set in the same area. His latest novel continues this regional emphasis, carefully constructing a semidocumentary frame for an intense family drama. This richly detailed narrative offers comedy, passion, and adventure. Recommended for public libraries.-Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville

David Laskin

"Bucking the Sun is one of those books that takes you over as you read it, invading your day dreams, lodging its cadences in your brain, sending you back to the page." -- The Washington Post

John Harvey

Doig has achieved his most adroit blend of fact and fancy in what is perhaps his best book since This House of Sky. What sets Doig apart from others who have farmed the same terrain is the deft way he handles the fruits of his research; fact and anecdote are woven into the text with a light and often humorous touch.
—San Francisco Chronicle

Kirkus Reviews

The sprawling tale that Doig, author of the Montana trilogy (English Creek, 1984; Dancing at the Rascal Fair, 1987; and Ride with Me, Moriah Montana, 1990), has been working on for years.

Doig grew up in eastern Montana during the Depression, when the Roosevelt Administration built the world's largest earthen dam high on the Missouri River, at Fort Peck. After impressive quantities of research, he has fashioned a Scotch-American family named Duff to tell the dam's story. There are Hugh and Meg, who will be displaced from their hardscrabble farm by the dam's water; their sons Owen, Bruce, and Neil, whose careers and marriages will be shaped by the dam; and the contentious women the sons marry: Charlene, Kate, and especially Rosellen, a frustrated writer who, along with Owen, forms the novel's consciousness. Older brother Owen schools himself as a civil engineer and writes a thesis that lands him the job of chief fill officer even though he's still in his 20s.Through Owen the reader gains a sense of what a massive undertaking the five-year project was, akin to an American great pyramid. The dam is the largest character here, sharing the drama with the ten thousand men and women the project employed; Owen and Rosellen are merely their admirable symbols. Owen becomes obsessed with the river's whims, the treacherousness of steel and gravel and shale, and he loses contact with his wife, Charlene. He falls for Rosellen then—but only briefly, for it is the dam, the great endeavor of his life, that he really loves.

The Duffs are believable but not memorable; Steinbeck this writer is not. Doig's real achievement is to chronicle—with empathy and precise, lyrical authority, down to the last load of gravel hauled in a sturdy Ford truck—the magnificent Fort Peck project and the desperate times out of which it arose.