Emily Ruskovich

The novel begins with Ann and Wade. They are married, and Ann is obsessed with Wade’s tragic past. His first wife, Jenny, murdered one of their daughters; the other daughter ran from the scene and was never found. Wade now has dementia and does not remember any of it clearly.

Each chapter begins with a point in time, usually a year, and the story is not told chronologically. Also, the main perspective changes with the chapters. Sometimes told from Ann’s point of view, sometimes Jenny’s, show more sometimes Jenny’s cellmate in prison, sometimes Ann’s imaginary view of the daughters, and rarely from Wade’s perspective.

The writing is beautiful and the author is able to adeptly set the scene and the emotion. I appreciated reading about a setting I am familiar with in northern Idaho. The characters are not particularly lovable. The only character I really liked was the younger daughter, and that was not even really her but Ann’s imagined version of her.

This book frustrated me because each perspective was a woman living vicariously through other women. It felt like they were always escaping themselves and placing themselves at the whim of some other actor rather than having much of their own agency. When they did have agency, they were related to negative acts like violence and theft. I felt cheated that I didn’t get to know more about why Jenny killed her child. show less

SPOILER ALERT: Much is revealed here, so if you ‘re going to read this fine book, read what I have to say after you have finished that last page.

There is a shocking brutality at the heart of this novel. A six-year-old girl named May, ends up murdered, her sister, June, is forever lost in the woods, and a woman goes to prison--their mother. Idaho is the title and the rugged setting for this story of the girls and their parents (Wade and Jenny), and Wade’s second wife, Ann. Wade and Ann show more love each other deeply, but all the details of what happened with the girls hasn’t been revealed. Wade has such a deep pain and anger within him, that it warps his character, and keeps him from ever revealing much to his new wife. His haunting and angry resistance to discussing this painful past has stymied Ann from learning much, and now his early onset dementia is hiding the facts of his own life from Wade himself. He’s very unpredictable. Once, Ann returns home to find that Wade has cut a large number of square holes all the way through the outside walls of their home, so that the stray cat in the house can get out. Okay?
This book is a brilliant look into the minds surrounding a brutal act, what may have caused it, and how it changed the people involved, and even those just looking for the truth. Ann’s attempts to learn from the sometimes-violent Wade, are a combination of gently and slowly, up against the ticking of the clock of his advancing dementia. The answers held in his head are losing definition and fading into a haze. Memory is anything but definitive in the best of times, but stacking shock, brutality, and illness on top of already unimaginable events, makes every single person’s memory very singular, personal, and different. Readers also learn some facts from Elizabeth, Jenny’s prison cellmate, things revealed from their many conversations.
Ruskovich is so good at describing the smallest detail with such care, that one could easily get lost when she continually has her characters paying notice to the looks and the smells of objects and places, like the inside of a truck or a glove. I love her descriptions of all the scents trapped in a simple glove that they had rubbed on the snout of the tracking bloodhound when it was leading the initial search for June. The author even shifts to the viewpoint of the hound as it tries to make sense of all the glove’s smells: grease, blood, sweat, the girl’s hair, honeysuckle, a skinned deer, seeds, and the smell of the truck. Not surprising, the dog has no luck in finding the girl. Yet, readers are also given the hound’s eye view as it travels along with its snout close to the ground, its huge ears hanging down and creating a tunnel that funneled all scents to its nose. I will now always think of intelligent design whenever I look at a bloodhound’s massive ears.
The book also requires that the reader stay alert to what’s going on and which particular character is informing the story. The chapters are titled with a single year, or a group of years, but are never marching in any chronological order through the book. You are dropped into many different times, acts, and with any of the books cast of characters.
The writing is vivid and so very rich with luscious details and language. Allow me to quote just one phrase, when Ann and Wade were watching dozens of blackbirds in the sky as they “converge and scatter like a handful of black sand thrown against the sky.” There seemed to be countless strokes of brilliance throughout the book. The book is a brutal joy to read.
The book won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author, as well as the prestigious International Dublin Literary Award, with an impressive award of $111,000. Reviews have made comparisons of Ruskovich to other writers such as Jim Harrison, Marilynne Robinson, Ken Kesey, and Rick Bass. I find myself easily agreeing with this, and it also explains my appreciation for her writing.
The fact that Ruskovich could pull this all off in her first published novel is amazing, and it definitely puts her on my radar screen for whatever she publishes next.

from a review
“Wrenching and beautiful … You’re in masterly hands here. [Emily] Ruskovich’s language is itself a consolation, as she subtly posits the troubling thought that decency can save us.” – The New York Times Book Review show less

Ann, eine junge Klavierlehrerin, heiratet Wade, der ein Jahr zuvor auf dramatische Weise seine Töchter verlor, während seine Exfrau im Gefängnis sitzt. Doch damit nicht genug, leidet er wie sein Vater und Großvater an Demenz, die ihn bereits im vergleichsweise jungen Alter befällt. Einerseits ein Segen angesichts der schrecklichen Vorkommnisse, andererseits wird ihm immer wieder schmerzlich bewusst, wie nach und nach seine Töchter in Vergessenheit geraten. Ann versucht derweil anhand show more der Fundstücke im Haus (Fotos, Kleinigkeiten wie Spielzeug, Haargummis etc.), sich selbst ein Bild von dem damaligen Geschehen zu machen.
Auch wenn die Geschichte zu Beginn wie ein Krimi erscheinen mag, ist es alles andere als das. Zwar wird eine unglaubliche Spannung im Hinblick auf die tatsächlichen Ereignisse am Berg aufgebaut, denen man sich langsam aus unterschiedlichen Richtungen nähert. Doch tatsächlich wird damit (wie auch mit anderen Geschehnissen) deutlich gemacht, wie sehr Vorstellung und Phantasie die Vergangenheit bestimmen, die sich wiederum auf die Gegenwart auswirken können. Ann ist beispielsweise immer mehr davon überzeugt, eine Mitschuld an diesem Unglück zu haben, was sie in große Gewissensbisse stürzt.
Das Buch verlangt ein aufmerksames Lesen, denn die Perspektiven wechseln häufig zwischen verschiedenen Personen, sodass man bei einer gewissen Achtlosigkeit schnell die Übersicht verlieren kann, was Realität und was Imagination ist. Zudem ist die Sprache trotz der überaus düsteren Atmosphäre sehr poetisch, für die man sich Zeit nehmen sollte. Die Autorin hat ein Gefühl für gelungene Beschreibungen wie beispielsweise beim Thema Briefe '..., zum Verschließen angeleckt von den Zungen der Vergangenheit.' (S. 73) oder 'Morgen früh, wenn Gott will, wirst Du wieder geweckt. Man kann es singen, so sanft man will, die Worte fletschen trotzdem die Zähne. Gott will nicht immer.' (S.101).
Gewiss ist es kein Gute-Laune-Buch oder lockere Unterhaltung für die Strandliege. Dafür aber eine spannende Lektüre, die Anregungen zum Umgang mit der eigenen Vergangenheit und den Erinnerungen daran liefert. show less

The title says, "Idaho - A Novel". I think the last bit is an assertion of intent meant to guide people like me who reach the end of the book knowing that I'd read something wonderful but not really being able to label it.

Each chapter in "Idaho" is a work of art. Emily Ruskovich can write in a way that makes you fully aware of how a particular person is experiencing something that is vivid and immediate but also ladened with context and possibility.

At one point she even helped me see inside show more the head of a blood hound on a search, head down, ears and folds of skin dampening all other stimuli except the hundreds of scents that contain the one scent I am looking for.

It seemed to me, that for much of the novel, I had become that blood hound and that each chapter was a scrap of fabric, soaked in sorrow, confusion, regret, guilt, love and, occasionally hope, that I would bend over and sniff at until I had extract every scent of emotion and traced the trails of circumstance, intent, memory and consequence that connect the chapters and the people in them.

It is an intense, absorbing experience that speaks to senses, my emotions but, by itself, does not satisfy my need for a narrative leading to some form of release. The non-linear nature of this narrative, the emphasis on moments of being and intense but bounded insights into a person, meant that reading "Idaho" felt more like experiencing other people's lives than it did reading a novel with a beginning, a middle and an end. I was given lots of hard, emotionally taxing questions but I was offered only the inference of answers, much as I am in real life.

There is a narrative. It is triggered by an act of violence that changes the lives of almost all of the characters in the book. Revealing this narrative in a non-linear way is not done to enhance the tension or to build to a great reveal, but to show that we are not the events that we live through. They can harm us or help us but the self we bring to each moment is what shapes the outcome of an event.

I'm sorry if that sounds obscure. Emily Ruskovich would never say anything so clumsily as that. It is merely me, trying to find meaning in what I was reading.

In "Idaho" I spent time seeing the world through the eyes of many people: May, a six year old girl living an isolated rural life in which her most intense relationship is with June, her older sister, whom she simultaneously loves and resents; Elizabeth, spending her life in prison for murder and trying to allow herself friendship and perhaps even love; Jenny, a woman who is trying to abnegate her right to anything she desires but who cannot stop herself from offering something of herself to others; Wade, a man who has survived tragedy and guilt and love but who is losing himself with each memory that slips out of reach; and Anne, who falls lives a life of sorrow-filled love that she does not feel entitled to cut herself free from.

I will remember these people for a long time. I will remember their joys and their pain and their ability to survive as long as they are remembered by someone, even if it is only themselves. I will remember the mountain they lived on and how its wildness and isolation and unforgiving winters shaped them like wind eroding sandstone.

Yet I still struggle with "Idaho" as "a novel". Probably this says more about my expectations than about Emily Ruskovich's writing but it changed my experience of the book. If "Idaho" had been a collection of short stories, I'd have gone, "How wonderful. This is like reading Alice Munro" but it was labelled a novel so I found myself expecting more connection.

The best example of what I mean is a character in this book, a young man who loses his leg through an accident in high school, who's experiences and thoughts are beautifully described but who seems to have only the most tangential connection to the other people in the book. I invested my imagination in him. I didn't like him but I began to understand him. Yet I couldn't make him fit and my inability to do so distracted and annoyed me.

I strongly recommend this book, novel or not. The writing is simply wonderful. The experiences are harrowing but in a way that made me more empathetic than horrified.

I am astonished that this is Emily Ruskovich's debut novel. I look forward to reading everything else that she writes.

I listened to the audio book version of "Idaho" which is read with consummate skill by Justine Eyre. She helped my hound dog follow the scent trails in the this book much more easily and with more passion than I had only read the text. show less