Red Rover Book

The end-flap of the dust jacket on this book relates a storyline extracted from it that sounds straightforward enough, but McNamer has written something far more complex and fascinating. She tells a story with a beginning, middle and an end, but not at all in that order. While the narrative is set almost entirely in Montana, timelines jump back and forth between 1927, 1939, 1944-46, and 2003. There's an extensive catalog of characters who get their time on center stage, their stories sometimes overlapping with others. Meanwhile, the supposed central characters disappear for long periods of time and we learn about them only indirectly.

Sounds maybe complicated, but I found the novel absorbing from beginning to end. Part of that owes to the subject matter. Two G-men employed by J. Edgar Hoover's wartime FBI start out as friends, and then something happens that sets them at odds. A young brother outlives his older brother by more than 50 years, but memory continues to bind them together. And in what seems to be a random universe, where people live and then die as if life itself were a plague, there are chance parallels like a B-29 running out of fuel as it returns from a bombing mission to Tokyo and a car running out of gas in a Montana snowstorm. Much of what makes the novel absorbing owes to McNamer's wonderful way with language, which is often poetic and haunting in its use of metaphor to capture nuances of emotion, attitude, and physical sensation. It's not a book you speed read. It's meant to be savored and puzzled over at a more leisurely pace. It's a book to get lost in; I heartily recommend it.