I don't give star ratings to books by faculty members of my MFA program.

Claire Davis's first novel builds from the small to the epic, an engaging read that moves along quickly. It's a story told from several different perspectives, one of them increasingly twisted, written in Claire's full-throated and inimitable style.

It's particularly notable for the sense of place. I enjoyed the artistry in the way two places were depicted; rural Montana, throughout, and softer Midwestern farmland through Ike's point of view. The latter place emerges partly through definition, partly by contrast with the main setting; an interesting technique. Moreover, the lasting impression of the uncaring Montana wilds isn't personified. Claire Davis manages to paint the landscape in all its fury while leaving it empty.

Frozen Cattle, Hot Writing
A Review by David Abrams
09/14/2002


In her debut novel, Winter Range, Claire Davis performs a marvelous, mysterious trick: She perfectly blends plot, character and language and makes it look as easy as a cowboy roping a steer.

It took Davis two years and countless revisions to craft this near-flawless novel of hard times in the modern West, but the sweatstains aren't even noticeable. Davis comes across like a writer with several books under her belt—especially when your eyes fall across lyrical sentences like these:
It was so still. The land and house and even the stars seemed frozen in place. The cattle were a darker piece of the night, as though the evening had congealed in solid fragments on the snow.
and
Ahead of them, the snow pitched into the headlights, the fields were a billowing white and seemed to glow as if the earth beneath were lamp-lit.
and
Sunlight buttered the counter surface.
Winter Range is filled with passages like that. Words come in a flurry of delicate snowflakes and settle gently on the tongue. Davis makes writing look effortless.

Sheriff Ike Parsons, the book's main character, doesn't have it so easy. For three years, he's been the long arm of the law in a small unnamed town in northeastern Montana since moving there from Milwaukee. He's married a third-generation local girl, Pattiann, but he still feels like an outsider.

It doesn't help matters when he finds himself engaged in a war of wills with local rancher Chas Stubblefield, who's allowing his cattle to starve to death. The thirty-three-year-old rancher has fallen on hard times in the bitter winter, and when he can't get a bank loan for more feed, he withdraws into self-pity and apathy. Parsons heads out to the rancher's spread to offer assistance and what he finds shocks him to the marrow of his morality: cattle freezing where they stand, and a brooding, maniacal Stubblefield near bankruptcy, cooking up the steaks from his dying herd.

Stubblefield is too proud to accept help; after all, he comes from “a long line of survivors.� Montanans as a whole have a lineage of survival, but what Stubblefield does shocks the folks in town. As Davis writes,
This was a community that knew each other's families and histories and shared the same jokes, and one person's grief became another's. Shame ran deepest. All of them were stung by Chas's shameful act, the cruelty of it, because that worked at the fabric of their lives—these animals, this way of life—all of it dependent on a basic respect for what was given into your hands.
Parsons decides to take matters into his own hands and gets a court order for the cattle. That's when trouble brews like thunderheads on the horizon. Stubblefield, already an unbalanced character dealing with an abusive past, takes revenge on the community.

Compounding the drama is the fact that Parson's wife Pattiann was once involved with Stubblefield during her wild youth. Davis sets up the conflict neatly, giving us bits and pieces of the characters' histories little by little so that it gathers momentum all the way to a shattering conclusion. The final chapter is a gripping one where Parsons, Pattiann, and Stubblefield meet their destinies in an ice storm of Biblical proportions. When Winter Range is made into a movie—and it's got the kind of dramatic oomph that's sure to capture Hollywood's attention—I'll be the first in line to see it.

However, Davis' way with words is something the movies could never recreate. Her sex scenes are tender (yet earthy), her descriptions of landscape are dazzling and her characters are completely unforgettable.

There have been a lot of books written about the modern American West, and I've read my fair share of them—novels and memoirs alike—but this is one of the few instances where the author has managed to get everything just right.

It's a hostile land whose clamped-mouth inhabitants aren't always receptive to outsiders. In the wide open spaces of Montana's hi-line, it can be an hour's drive between ranches; and a bank loan can make all the difference between a community's survival or failure. Davis captures all those little details of living in a small town and an ice-locked landscape. She also kindles the genuine warmth of a close-knit people and their social rituals—a funeral and a community dance come alive with equal passion.

Sure, she makes a few first-novelist mistakes—an early scene in a barbershop introduces too many characters too quickly, a couple of plot strands don't lead anywhere—but those are minor piffles that will blow away like a drift of loose snow. Winter Range is, through and through, a triumphant blare on the trumpets announcing the arrival of an important new talent. ( )