Great American Road Trip: Idaho

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich Rating: ★★★★½ Publication Date: January 1, 2017 Genre: fiction Pages: 320 ReRead?: No Project: 2024 read my hoard, great American road trip One hot August day a family drives to a mountain clearing to collect birch wood. Jenny, the mother, is in charge of lopping any small limbs off the logs with a hatchet. Wade, the father, does the stacking. The two daughters, June and May, aged nine and six, drink lemonade, swat away horseflies, bicker, and sing snatches of songs as they while away the time. But then something unimaginably shocking happens, an act so extreme it will scatter the family in every different direction. In a story told from multiple perspectives and in razor-sharp prose, we gradually learn more about this act, and the way its violence, love and memory reverberate through the life of every character in Idaho.

Stop 4/50. I have had this book on my TBR since it was published in 2017.

My Washington book was a bust. This book more than made up for it.

I can’t say that it was an “enjoyable” read in the traditional sense of the word, because in many ways, this book left me gutted. But, it will be a long time before I forget May and Wade and Ann and Jenny and especially June, or the house on Mt. Iris, near Priest Lake in Idaho.

I read Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson in January, 2023, another strangely beautiful book that is set in Northern Idaho. As I was reading this book, I was reminded of Robinson’s writing style. When I read the afterward, this made a lot of sense to me. Ruskovich studied at the well-regarded Iowa Writer’s Workshop, under a list of luminaries that included Robinson.

The writing in this book is gorgeous. Each character is delineated with precision and delicacy. The book begins with an act of inexplicable violence – Jenny, wife of Wade, murders her youngest daughter, May, with a hatchet. June, the older daughter, is lost when Wade takes Jenny and May into town and leaves June behind so she doesn’t have to share a backseat with her dead sister, promising to return for her. By the time he returns, June is gone. She is 9.

The reader is transported back and forth between the narratives of Wade, who has lost his entire family in one terrible day and who, because of early onset Alzheimer’s is losing his memory of his family bit by inexorable bit.  Ann, Wade’s second wife and a former teacher who dwells upon her memory of the single time she saw June as she grapples with the reality that soon, she will carry the burden of a past tragedy that Wade has forgotten. Jenny, who spends the next three decades in prison, frozen in a sort of stasis, her life ending on the day she murdered her daughter just as surely as she ended her daughter’s life. And Elizabeth, who becomes Jenny’s cellmate, surrogate daughter and friend.

This book is all about the characters. It is strangely luminous for a book that is so dark, and the humanity shines through in a way that I can neither understand nor explain. I don’t know if I would recommend it, beyond saying that I loved it. It has been seven years since this book was published. Whenever Emily Ruskovich publishes her next book, I’ll be first in line to buy it.

Where I was last: Washington
Where I went next: Nevada