Dancing At The Rascal Fair

The central volume in Ivan Doig's acclaimed Montana trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is an authentic saga of the American experience at the turn of this century and a passionate, portrayal of the immigrants who dared to try new lives in the imposing Rocky Mountains. Ivan Doig's supple tale of landseekers unfolds into a fateful contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill, walled apart by their obligations as they and their stormy kith and kin vie to tame the brutal, beautiful Two Medicine country.

In this prize-winning portrait of a time and place—Montana in the 1930s—that at once inspires and fulfills a longing for an explicable past, Ivan Doig has created one of the most captivating families in American fiction, the McCaskills. The witty and haunting narration, a masterpiece of vernacular in the tradition of Twain, follows the events of the Two Medicine country's summer: the tide of sheep moving into the high country, the capering Fourth of July rodeo and community dance, and an end-of-August forest fire high in the Rockies that brings the book, as well as the McCaskill family's struggle within itself, to a stunning climax. It is a season of escapade as well as drama, during which fourteen-year-old Jick comes of age. Through his eyes we see those nearest and dearest to him at a turning point—“where all four of our lives made their bend”—and discover along with him his own connection to the land, to history, and to the deep-fathomed mysteries of one’s kin and one’s self.

This greathearted novel is the finale of Ivan Doig's passionate and authentic trilogy about the McCaskill family and their alluring Two Medicine country along the hem of the northern Rockies. Jick McCaskill, the illustrious narrator of English Creek, returns as the witty and moving voice in this classic encounter with the American road and all the rewards and travails it can bring. Jick faces his family's—and his state's—legacy of loss and perseverance from the vantage point of Montana's centennial in 1989 when his daughter Mariah enlists him as Winnebago chauffeur to her and her ex-husband, the magnificently ornery and eloquent columnist Riley Wright, when their news-paper dispatches them to dig up stories of the "real Montana." Just as the centennial is a cause for reflection as well as jubilation, the exuberant travels of this trio bring on encounters with the past in "memory storms" that become occasions for reassessment and necessary accommodations of the heart.

From a great American storyteller, a one-of-a-kind father and his precocious son, rocked by a time of change. Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge of the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom also has a son named Rusty, an “accident between the sheets” whose mother deserted them both years ago.The pair make an odd kind of family, with the bar their true home, but they manage just fine. Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the future, upending every certainty in Rusty’s life and generating a mist of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyone’s vision but his own. As Rusty struggles to decipher the oddities of adult behavior and the mysteries build toward a reckoning, Ivan Doig wonderfully captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.

Ivan Doig's supple tale of land seekers unfolds into a fateful contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill, walled apart by their obligations as they and their stormy kith and kin vie to tame the brutal, beautiful Two Medicine country. This is the central volume in Doig's acclaimed Montana series. National ads/media.

Given in honor of District Governor Hugh Summers and Mrs. Ahnise Summers by the Rotary Club of Aggieland with matching support from the Sara and John H. Lindsey '44 Fund, Texas A & M University Press, 2004.

"Elizabeth Simpson has written this first comprehensive, book-length study of Ivan Doig's work for Doig fans as well as for scholars. While the central focus is Doig's work, Simpson also suggests new ways western writing can be examined in terms of folklore, history, landscape, and style. Well-known Doig novels including This House of Sky, Run with Me Mariah Montana, Winter Brothers, English Creek, and The Sea Runners are analyzed separately with attention to structure, narrative strategy, theme, character, pace, tone, and informing metaphors. Recurrent motifs that bind Doig's work into a canon are also explored. The reader is introduced to changes in folklore studies in the past few decades followed by an examination of the impact these changes have had on literature. Doig's use of folklore to develop character and theme, to regulate pace and tension, also allows him to paint the life of the region he is writing about. As well, Doig's use of folklore suggests ways to link the history of the West with a meaningful present. Doig's writing also emphasizes the interrelationships between landscape and the people who live in it." "In the second part of this study, Elizabeth Simpson addresses the concept of profane and sacred space and adversity as means that western writers use to perceive the relationship between character and landscape. The classic western myth of the solitary hero against the wilderness is not the focus of contemporary western writing where, instead, "community" takes on special meaning. One of the prevalant contemporary themes is the physical and psychological danger of isolation." "While individually Doig's books may differ from each other, they form a distinct corpus because the author's use of context informs the text. As Elizabeth Simpson concludes after examining Doig's style, "Doig is, in the most inclusive sense of the term, a regional writer: one who weaves the history, the landscape, the folklore, the language of his home place into stories that articulate major themes in American life.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Abbott offers a fruitful new way to read science fiction, one that also greatly enriches our understanding of western history and its impact on our collective imagination. Detailing the overlap of science fiction and western fiction - especially relating to their mutual interest in and concerns about frontier expansionism - he reveals an unsuspected common ground that informs the writings of both camps." "Reviewing the work of many Hugo and Nebula Award winners, as well as drawing upon popular film and television series (like the Buck Rogers serials), Abbott's study journeys across the far reaches of science fiction's universe."