Twelve-year-old Rusty is a reliable chronicler of events both within and beyond his understanding in The Bartender's Tale. Ivan Doig has previously written about Two Medicine County in northern Montana in Work Song and The Whistling Season--a place where nature is, indeed, raw in tooth and claw, where characters abound and where the ordinary can become extraordinary in an instant due to hostile weather, natural disaster or the sheer orneriness of its denizens. In this evocative novel, there is some of each.
Doig, a consummate storyteller, tells us that Rusty is the result of "an accident between the sheets," so his first six years are spent with an aunt, uncle and two hateful cousins in Phoenix after his mother walks out on her four-month-old infant. The story begins when Tom, Rusty's father, fetches him home to Gros Ventre and the Medicine Lodge, its finest bar. Six years pass uneventfully--or at least unknown to the reader--until 1960, when Rusty turns 12. A red Cadillac appears and out steps Proxy, a former taxi dancer well known to Tom, and her 21-year-old daughter, Francine. They both have a connection to Tom, which Proxy decides warrants a favor: Tom needs to teach her how to be a bartender.
Rusty and his friend, Zoe, whose parents run the local cafe, respond to this new development as they do everything else in Gros Ventre, by acting out theatrical bits gleaned from the movies--she is Muscles, he is Ace--in vintage Doig patter. Their lives during this magical summer revolve around an area in the bar which has a vent conveniently located so Rusty and Zoe can hear everything but cannot be seen. There is also an enormous back room, which Tom operates like a pawnshop, making mysterious trips to Canada to sell merchandise.
A wild card appears in the person of Delano Robertson, who arrives with a grant from the Library of Congress to record the "MissingVoices" of America for posterity. How this all plays out is replete with twists and turns aplenty as a boy, his friend and his father find their way through landscape, character and cataclysm, learning as they go. --Valerie Ryan
Shelf Talker: Ivan Doig returns to familiar territory with a new story about a boy, his father, a bar and a soon-to-be-lost way of life.