Five Skies

Three men with differing backgrounds and ages work together on a construction project in the middle of the Idaho desert. They live in a tent on the job site and occasionally visit a small town about 20 miles away. Each is harboring an emotional wound from a traumatic experience. They form close bonds over the course of the project. They are able to forget their troubles for a while, as they lose themselves in their work, feeling pleasure in doing the job well.

This book is beautifully written. The prose is sparse. The plot is low key. The characters are deeply developed. The tone is melancholy. The scenery of southern Idaho is pained in words. It is a stark landscape, filled with sagebrush and rabbits. A river lies at the bottom of a show more gorge. There are many conversations related to engineering and building construction. The novel is structured such that dialogue is used to gradually reveal their character traits and backstories.

The narrative is propelled by the sense of wanting to know what is initially unknown. What are they trying to avoid by getting away from the world for a while? What is this project intended to accomplish? What will the men do after the project is finished?

Eventually, all is revealed, and it leads up to an intense conclusion. The dramatic ending is surprising after the laid-back pace in the early parts. I very much enjoyed this book of inner turmoil in the midst of natural beauty. show less

Men at Work

Three men stand at the edge of a remote river gorge in Idaho, about to begin work on a summer construction project: a large wooden ramp at the lip of the canyon, built for a motorcycle stuntwoman who plans to jump the canyon, a la Evel Knievel. The three men are relative strangers to each other, but before the summer is over, they will bond in ways none of them could have predicted.

That's the sum total of Ron Carlson's first novel in thirty years, Five Skies. It's a beautiful, patiently-moving narrative about the value of hard work and the way flawed men come to grips with their personal demons. Each of these three men are running from something: the gigantic man-of-few-words Arthur Key, who used to build collapsible sets for show more movies and who can't shake feelings of guilt over a recent death; Darwin Gallegos, the former ranch-hand at Rio Difficulto, where the men are building the ramp, and who won't let go of the stabbing pain of his wife's death in a plane crash five months earlier; and Ronnie Panelli, a nineteen-year-old petty thief who is trying to mend the error of his ways.

The men are each, in their own stoic way, trying to heal themselves by plunging into a summer of hard labor. Arthur, for instances, reveals this to us early in the novel: He told himself he was trying to regroup, to get a grip, but he now knew, after this time away from the life he had ruined, he wasn't doing a very good job of it. The bulk of the novel demonstrates how three tough but sensitive men go about untying the knots that bind them to past sorrows and mistakes.

Amid the hairy navel-gazing, the methodical work of engineering goes on unabated. Save for a few trips into the nearby town of (aptly-named) Mercy, the action is confined to the job site on the wind-swept plateau. Even here, Carlson finds poetry in the muscular world of construction, filling Five Skies with precise details of the labor and materials involved in building a structure that will, in essence, be a one-shot wonder. Here, for instance, is one paragraph planted early in the book when Arthur goes shopping at the local hardware store:

He had a list in his pocket and he began assembling the items: wooden stakes; heavy twine; steel hinges; two hundred yards of the rope; a one-inch tempered steel drill bit; forty-yard-long dowels, diameter one inch; a basket of steel fittings; boxes of wood screws; bags of brads; a roof stapler and staples; five gallons of wood sealer; five gallons of white enamel; spray enamel, white, black red; coarse-bristle paintbrushes; four paint rollers with extension handles; ten bags of posthole mix; five gallons of creosote; and a shopping cart of miscellaneous small tools, including chisels, a rasp and a fine Stanley wood plane.

The novel is a literary blueprint of work, the diary of one summer of sweat and sore muscles. The men carefully clear brush from the site, dig post-holes, hammer sheets of lumber together and smooth asphalt for the runway. They are proud of their work, but are always reminded that it's just a job and that soon the summer will end and they will drift away from the site and, most likely, from each other. There is one particularly telling scene when they travel to the other side of the canyon and look back on the half-built ramp:

Key was sobered by the panorama, and the vastness smothered his notions that the project might succeed. It was one thing, and a good thing, to secure a rail or build a step, but under the pressing sky and against this thousand-mile wind, and across the red and violet vacuum of the rocky chasm, every nail they'd pounded seemed a waste of time. The three men stood in the soft sand near the lip of rock in their sunglasses and looked across at this little jobsite.

The physical labor may take center stage, but it's the personal growth of each character we're most interested in. Carlson unfolds those revelations little by little, not playing his whole hand all at once.

These characters, these men, are kind and patient with each other—something you don't typically find in the predominantly cynical fiction of today. This is wholly refreshing to read and lends Five Skies a sweet but melancholy air that lingers even after you've set the book down and gone about the rest of your day's business. Arthur, Darwin and Ronnie are guaranteed to stay with you for a long time, that's how magnificent a job Carlson has done in creating these three men.

The wind-swept plains of Idaho will also be burned into your imagination. There are beautiful, compelling scenes—especially one in which the men descend into the canyon on a fishing trip—that have the power to take your breath away. Here is a passage that's typical of the way in which the land resonates into the story:

They had woken to the sky a perfect trick, a magnified color well beyond cobalt. Tangible and tender, the air and the earth after the rain seemed minted, some rare promise in the leverage of the early sunshine. Rags of mist stood twisting in the atmosphere.

Those sentences also point to one of the novel's minor flaws: a complicated syntax that often calls attention to itself and reminds us that a writer is at work, sweating over these sentences as he pounds them into place. Those moments are few and far between, however, and Five Skies succeeds best when Carlson relaxes and lets the story proceed transparently and without interference.

Carlson uses metaphor subtly and effectively, knowing just when to slip in an image that will echo beyond itself. Arthur, for instance, is initially disappointed that the project is a motorcycle stunt ramp and he tells Darwin, "I was really hoping this would be a bridge. That would have been more than I could chew, but I was hoping."

The whole book, really, is about three men searching for ways to span the emotional chasms which have, in various ways, isolated them from the rest of society. Here, in the high Idaho plateau country, they will do their best to overcome past mistakes; some will succeed, others will be cut short by new tragedies, but the point is that they're trying. They are men at work on their souls and it's a testament to Carlson's talent that he's able to make this inner journey as exciting to watch as any high-octane testosterone action movie. show less

Ron Carlson assembles three men in "Five Skies," each at a different, trying stage of his inner and overt journey. They all have an angry, or guilty, place they are running from, and assemble on a high cliff in Idaho to build something right.

Arthur Key is a huge man, muscled, experienced, intelligent, and kindly. He is also skittish and haunted by something that happened at home in California. Darwin Gallegos is the onetime manager on the ranch where they work; his wife was recently killed when the light plane she was flying in with the ranch owner crashed. He is angry with his former boss, and with God. Ronnie Panelli, the junior partner on the project, learns things about himself in leaps and bounds, and begins to understand that he's show more growing out of being a petty thief.

The comeraderie of the three is a rare treat. I read this immediately after Janet Fitch's "Paint it Black," and it works pretty well as the male version companion-piece. Here, the talk is all in the halting, laconic code that men use when they're unwilling to share their deepest feelings. The easy-going ribbing they give each other, in lieu of honest, heartfelt talk, is itself clever and delightful. Laurel wreaths to Carlson for these touches. They're wonderful. I do need to add, however, that as full of the male ethos as this book is, the members of this crew have more support for each other than they do for themselves.

Carlson's milieu of naked land, the uncluttered vistas of southeastern Idaho, affords him a place that is itself metaphor. The men are at an ending and a new starting; their lives have nothing but space in which to build. Their project, constructing a massive ramp for an insane motorcycle stunt, carries symbolic weight, too, as they each consider a heroic leap from their past lives.

"Five Skies" is brief, clean, heartfelt, and effective. This is an elegant fiction, and it will transport you the way a good book should. I recommend it very highly. show less

“The river came through this park winding in a perfect S and the sand and willows and twenty gigantic cottonwoods were half in the shade. The air rode down the river fragrant with water and willows.”

Three men get together for a construction project in Idaho. That is the gist. I love reading stories set in the modern West and Carlson seems to be the kind of author I enjoy but this was an uneven narrative and I am not sure I needed a description of building a ramp in painstaking detail. I still found plenty to admire. I like these three, flawed, rugged, characters and Carlson can certainly describe the great outdoors with a sense of beauty and serenity. The author is known as a short story writer and I wonder if I would appreciate him show more more, in that format. I will definitely give him another try. show less

A heartbreaking, beautifully wrought masterpiece of devastating loss & questioned faith, of earned trust & unbreakable friendship. Ron Carlson’s unerring command of language sweeps over you with its beauty and subtlety – there’s something about his voice that utterly compels you to listen, to heed every word he has to say. Even the most seemingly innocent, almost insignificant narrative incidents bear the immeasurable weight of Life on their shoulders. You can feel the mass of the Idaho sky above you, see the chasm of red rock canyon, and hear the lyrical sounds of the river below. Sentences like: “The sky was an amorphous glaring canopy, and the horizons were all tattered in such bright haze” just don’t occur in common show more fiction. I found myself marking passages just because I liked the way the words rolled off the page into my lap: “...the wind was steady and even as if it were a permanent feature of the desert around them, the sparse sage and periodic igneous cairns of porous red cinders.”
Even the general plotline is relatively innocuous – three men get together to spend a summer living & working atop a barren plateau in southern Idaho, building a motorcycle stunt ramp aimed out over an enormous red rock canyon. The building of this ridiculous stunt ramp almost cheapens the work they do there; no one is more aware of this than the men. But the work is all part of a process for each man, whether they are aware of it or not. Each is fleeing hardship and pain in their lives, but when these men begin to trust each other and each of their work abilities on the site, they each begin to work inward on their own and heal their own wounds. Watching the transformation process of these characters, these men, in the hands of Mr. Carlson is unlike anything I can recall reading. Its always hard to compare books that you like with each other – I find myself reading different genres for different reasons, different authors for different reasons. But in the last several years, the books that have affected me the most have been "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, which left me shattered and weeping with its portrait of the impending bleak future of humanity, and this one, which explores themes of friendship, loyalty, the bonds of men, and the inner workings of their souls. But more than anything, this just made me understand what it means to be a great writer. show less

Five Skies by Ron Carlson is a subtle and complex journey through the emotional landscape of three decent men trying to reconstruct their lives in the wake of personal turmoil and pain. It shows in great detail how men deal with emotional pain—how men intuitively know how to reach out with studied casualness and enormous subtlety to provide emotional support to other men in times of need.

The plot is simple. The owner of the Rio Difficulto ranch has agreed to lease a small portion of land located adjacent to 1,500-feet-deep river gorge to a group of entertainment investors who plan to produce a Memorial Day stunt jump across the gorge by a daredevil, Evel-Knievel-type woman on a motorcycle. To create the stunt, the investors first show more need to ready the site. Three workmen are found to build the launch ramp, a road, bleachers, and a temporary chain-link fence to protect the on-site spectators from any fatal missteps at the edge of the gorge.

The men who accept the job are Arthur Keys, Darwin Gallegos, and Ronnie Panelli. They will live and work onsite, surrounded by nothing but the primordial plains of southern Idaho. They will be working in the wilderness, without a sign of civilization in all directions. Mercy, the nearest town, is 20 miles away. Each man is attracted to the project because it offers the isolation they require to heal their emotional wounds. We know these men are scarred by life, but we don’t know why. The facts about each man’s past are slowly revealed over the course of the novel.

In this novel, we read a lot about the day-in-and-day-out details of the work site projects, together with the everyday details of how these men live together in their makeshift camp. In their isolation, sleeping in a tent and cooking outside under the 360-degree vastness of open prairie skies, they carve out a sheltering family existence. The book is infused with a deep love for the natural environment, especially the rugged western high plains plateaus. How the men interact with the natural environment plays a central role.

I’ve always been aware that men and women heal their emotional pain in completely different ways. Women seem to confront their emotional pain head on, typically relying on close women friends to help them understand and deal with their pain. On the other hand, men like to steal away to lick their wounds in private, or bury their pain in an avalanche of hard work. Rarely do men directly seek emotional support from anyone, particularly not from any of their male friends. Yet somehow, almost incomprehensibly, in acutely subtle ways, men do receive the support they need from their male comrades. Five Skies captures this process—the process of how men reach out, with extreme subtly, to help and heal their emotionally wounded colleagues.

This is a book that must be read carefully and slowly. If you are an astute reader, you’ll recognize a lot of psychological healing going on between these hardened workmen, but it often appears so quickly and is gone again in a flash, that it can easily be missed—a gesture here, a few innocent but tender words there, a helping hand, a kind word of praise—all buried within the everyday tasks of living and working together. What a treasure it is to find a book that captures this process with such crystalline clarity!

Ron Carlson’s prose is richly layered and literary. Sometimes, it takes on the rhythm and tenor of Annie-Dillard-like poetry masquerading as prose. This style stands in stark contrast to the everyday masculine simplicity of the events related through these words, but complements the emotional depth being captured. Together they work a magic synergy that gives the whole that much more impact. This is a carefully crafted work of literature, and I sincerely hope it wins a major literary prize so that a wider audience can learn about it and enjoy it. Five Skies has all the markings of a fine American literary classic. It is full of quiet wisdom. It is a book to be treasured and reread. It captured my heart, and I recommend it highly. show less

A really good book, almost a great book. Carlson effortlessly moves between each of the three main characters' points of view as the reader experiences their private pain intermingling with increased connections to each other. It's a very subtle novel, not one to breeze through quickly or you'll miss the pockets of humor. Much of the dialogue reminded me of a play--if I see it onstage after having read it to myself, the lines bloom in ways my own brain would never have come up with. The subtle meanings behind words could easily be glossed over by an inattentive reader.

Why wasn't it a great book? Because Carlson was almost too subtle at times, and he lost opportunities to keep the reader's suspense going. For example, in one scene a show more character is injured, but instead of starting with the moment of injury, Carlson chose to start with the men in the car on the way to the clinic in town, then to go back and tell how the injury happened. Well, you knew the guy was OK because of the tone of the text as they drove along. In the climax, I again found myself spending more energy figuring out what had happened than reacting to it. show less