West of Here

Starred review from November 1, 2010
A century after the late–19th-century settlers of Olympic Peninsula to the west of Seattle set out to build a dam, their descendants want to demolish it to bring back fish runs, providing one of the many plots in this satisfyingly meaty work from Evison (All About Lulu). The scenes of the early settlers track an expedition into the Olympic wilderness and the evolving relations between settlers and the Klallam tribe, provide insights into early feminism, and outline an entrepreneur's dream to build the all-important dam. By comparison, the contemporary stories are chock-full of modern woe and malaise, including a Bigfoot watcher and seafood plant worker who wishes to relive his glory days as a high school basketball star; an ex-convict who sets out into the wilderness to live off the land; and an environmental scientist who is hit with an unexpected development. Evison does a terrific job at creating a sense of place as he skips back and forth across the century, cutting between short chapters to sustain a propulsive momentum while juggling a sprawling network of plots and a massive cast of characters real enough to walk off the page. A big novel about the discovery and rediscovery of nature, starting over, and the sometimes piercing reverberations of history, this is a damn fine book.

March 28, 2011
Evison's capacious novel toggles between glorious past and constrained present, the idealism of the settlers of the American West and their hapless descendants. Port Bonita fails to live up to the imagined splendor of the Western pioneers, becoming, instead, the place where the American Dream goes to dieâor, at the very least, to convalesce. Edoardo Ballerini is well-equipped to handle the blended tones of Evison's story, bouncing between hushed intimacy and a fierce growl. He steps delicately through the gruff talk of Port Bonita's inhabitants, pulling back into a poetic reverie for Evison's descriptions of the landscape and surroundings, reminding the listener that even in this world-weary city, something of America's magnificence remains. An Algonquin hardcover.

Starred review from October 1, 2010

Evison (All About Lulu) deserves national acclaim for his latest novel, which is set in the fictional town of Port Bonita on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Chapters that alternate between the 1890s and the present result in a Northwest historical novel with modern counterpoints, like Sometimes a Great Notion meets Citizen Vince. At its beginning, Port Bonita was a town of hope and industry. James Mather sets out to explore the rugged interior of the Elwha River valley; Ethan Thornburgh envisions a mighty dam powering a bustling city; his estranged lover, Eva Lambert, prefers a more utopian vision of a commonwealth colony. Flash forward a century, and Port Bonita's residents have less lofty goals: "Krig" Krigstadt thirsts for a steady supply of Kilt Lifter ale; ex-con Timmon Tillman wants to be left the hell alone; his parole officer, Franklin Bell, just wants a woman to date. VERDICT Fans of Jess Walter and Jim Lynch will be thrilled to find another author whose love for the Pacific Northwest and its people shines through with humor and clarity. [Ten-city tour; this title was a pick at BEA and ALA "Editors Buzz" panels.--Ed.]--Christine Perkins, Bellingham P.L., WA

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2011

Well-plotted, literate novel of the 19th-century settling of a corner of the West and the still-resounding echoes of decisions made long ago.

The Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, Wash., was little known even to Native American people until very recent times, thanks to its "chaos of snow-clad ranges colliding at odd angles, a bulwark of spiny ridges defending a hulking central range like the jaws of a trap." Those imposing mountains long defied exploration and exploitation, but in time, as sophomore novelist Evison (All About Lulu, 2008) explains, they drew a particular kind of person who just wouldn't go away, seeing in them the promise of endless wealth. So it is with James Mather, an "Arctic explorer, Indian fighter, and rugged individual" who arrives in the soggy outpost of Port Bonita with orders from the governor to bring the place under the aegis of civilization. Ethan Thornburgh, young and dissolute, has a somewhat different vision: He aims to turn the mountains into money, the better to make the place his own domain. The communitarians ("Weren't they socialists or something?" asks a latter-day resident of the place, none too well versed in history), squatters and Indians who live nearby have different visions still. Much of Evison's story--which, naturally, involves a headstrong pioneer woman--is conventional, though, borrowing a page from Ivan Doig's Winter Brothers (1980), it makes room for closely observed notes on American Indian life as seen through the lens of a couple of key players. What brings the story to life, though, is Evison's juxtaposition of a century past with a much different present, in which the derring-do of our forebears is seen as so much criminality, and the things that they built--particularly dams--as so many insults to the land that require undoing and atonement.

Evison moves his narrative backward and forward through time, taking a leisurely approach to telling a story that is seldom dramatic, but that Westerners will recognize as their own.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from February 15, 2011
Evison, author of this audacious historical novel, manages a near-impossible feat: first, he creates an almost absurdly complex narrative structure, bridging more than 100 years of life in Washington State and encompassing multiple points of view, and then he grounds the sublime architechtonic whole in the vividly realized daily lives of characters who exist completely in their individual moments but whose actions reverberate back and forth across time. The action swirls around the fictional town of Port Bonita, on Washingtons Olympic Peninsula, and jumps between the 1890s, when various explorers and entrepreneurs were attempting to roll up their sleeves and put this place on the map, and 2006, when the descendants of those rugged individualists are in the process of dismantling the dam that their ancestors built. Yes, the tension between taming nature and restoring it drives the narrative, but it never pigeonholes it; rather, the interconnectedness of the structure expands to encompass the lives of the entrepreneur who built the dam and his ancestor who finds that failure tastes like gunmetal on his tongue; the explorer who prays for a life beyond fear, a life that got bigger, really got bigger, as it recedes; and the factory foreman who is alternately obsessed with tracking Bigfoot and despondent over his inability to get a girl (No woman in the history of the world had ever looked into a guys eyes and said, You had me at Bigfoot). And countless others, who both support the parallels between eras and exist robustly in their own fully formed selves. Any one of Evisons numerous major characters could have owned his or her own novel; that they coexist perfectly in this one, undiminished but without overwhelming one another, is testament to the books greatness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)