The Whistling Season

"Can't cook but doesn't bite." So begins the newspaper ad offering the services of an A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition that draws the hungry attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. And so begins the unforgettable season that deposits the noncooking, nonbiting, ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias Coulee along with a stampede of homesteaders drawn by the promise of the Big Ditch — a gargantuan irrigation project intended to make the Montana prairie bloom. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the several kinds of education — none of them of the textbook variety — Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region's one-room schoolhouse.

A paean to a vanished way of life and the eccentric individuals and idiosyncratic institutions that made it fertile, The Whistling Season is Ivan Doig at his evocative best.

"Any writer's work should be judged solely on its own merits, yet in this fine novel by Ivan Doig, one may be forgiven for marveling at the creation of such a work at an advanced stage of this writer's illustrious career. (Wallace Stegner — to whom, as with Doig, landscape was character and event in any story, and particularly Western landscapes — comes to mind with his classic Crossing to Safety.)Like many of Doig's earlier novels, The Whistling Season is set in the past in rural eastern Montana — and addresses that time and place in distinct, uncluttered prose that carries the full enthusiasm of affection and even love — for the landscape, the characters, and the events of the story — without being sentimental or elegiac. The novel is narrated by an aging Montana state superintendent of schools, Paul Milliron, who is charged with deciding the fate of the state's last scattered rural schools, and who, in the hours preceding his meeting to determine those schools' fate, recalls the autumn of 1909, when he was 13 and attending his own one-room school in Marias Coulee.Recently widowed, Paul's father, overwhelmed by the child-rearing duties presented by his three sons, in addition to his challenging farming duties, hires a housekeeper, sight unseen, from a newspaper ad. The housekeeper, Rose, proclaims that she 'can't cook but doesn't bite.' She turns out to be a beguiling character, and she brings with her a surprise guest — her brother, the scholarly Morris, who, though one of the most bookish characters in recent times, also carries brass knuckles and — not to give away too much plot — somehow knows how to use them.The schoolteacher in Marias Coulee runs away to get married, leaving Morris to step up and take over her job. The verve and inspiration that he, an utter novice to the West, to children and to teaching children, brings to the task is told brilliantly and passionately, and is the core of the book's narrative, with its themes of all the different ways of knowing and learning, at any age.Doig's strengths in this novel are character and language — the latter manifesting itself at a level of old-fashioned high-octane grandeur not seen previously in Doig's novels, and few others': the sheer joy of word choices, phrases, sentences, situations, and character bubbling up and out, as fecund and nurturing as the dryland farmscape the story inhabits is sere and arid. The Whistling Season is a book to pass on to your favorite readers: a story of lives of active choice, lived actively. (June)" Signature Review by Rick Bass. Rick Bass is the Pushcart and O. Henry award-winning author of more than 20 fiction and nonfiction books. His second novel, The Diezmo, will be published in June. " Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Ivan Doig writes about a vanished way of life on the Western plains with the kind of irony-free nostalgia that seems downright courageous in these ironic times. A celebration tinged with sadness, his new novel, 'The Whistling Season,' tells a story twice removed from us: It's the late 1950s, and that little Soviet satellite has startled the United States into an educational panic. Paul Milliron, the... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) narrator, is superintendent of the Montana schools, and he's come to Great Falls to make a sad announcement to the superintendents, teachers and school boards of Montana's 56 counties: In pursuit of greater efficiency and rigor, the state has decided to close all its one-room schoolhouses. 'What is being asked, no, demanded of me,' Paul laments, 'is not only the forced extinction of the little schools. It will also slowly kill those rural neighborhoods, the ones that have struggled from homestead days on to adapt to dryland Montana.' As the burden of making that speech weighs on him, Paul remembers his own experience in a one-room school 43 years earlier, and that reverie forms the body of this charming novel.

'When I visit the back corners of my life again after so long a time,' he begins, 'littlest things jump out first.' Indeed, this story is mostly a collection of 'littlest things,' but all of them jump under the animating influence of Doig's vision. At 13, Paul was the oldest son of a widely respected homesteader named Oliver Milliron. A recently widowed father of three, he raised his boys in an idyllic atmosphere of deep affection and rich intellectuality, but the housekeeping had reached a crisis point: 'We practiced downkeep,' Paul admits. His father finally decided to hire someone to clean up and cook their meals. Perhaps the comic tone of an ad he spotted in the newspaper is what sealed his determination: 'Can't Cook But Doesn't Bite ... Housekeeping position sought by widow. Sound morals, exceptional disposition.'

When this woman arrives all the way from Minneapolis, she's everything they could have hoped for and more: Pretty, kind, industrious, full of interesting stories. 'Just by showing up,' Paul says, 'she turned the mood of a place around the way a magnet acts on a compass.'

Hmm, a witty, saintly father of three hires a beautiful widow with abundant charm: How on Earth does this turn out?

OK, so the major arc of the plot isn't packed with suspense, but 'The Whistling Season' isn't about the destination (which is a good thing, because some contrived surprises at the end are the novel's only real weakness). Nevertheless, complications arise from the fact that the new housekeeper doesn't arrive by herself. Her brother, Morrie, a quirky little man with an enormous mustache and a vocabulary to match, tags along. Rose and Morrie come with few possessions and even fewer explanations: vague rumors of a troubled past, a lost fortune, the heartache of 'perdition.' When asked what skills he can offer in this remote Montana town, Morrie claims: 'Whist. Identification of birds. A passable reciting voice. ... Latin declensions. A bit rusty on Greek.'

But as luck would have it, the town's joyless school teacher elopes with the preacher, and Morrie is pressed into service. He has no experience in a classroom, but he is a widely educated man with an infinitely curious mind, a good heart and enough enthusiasm to win over the children — or at least make a spectacle of himself. Even the oldest kids, the thugs in eighth grade who have 'a rim of fuzz on the upper lip ... as if they were starting to grow moss from all their years trapped in the schoolroom,' are captivated when Morrie offers explanations that 'soar off into full trapeze flight.'

To read these delightful chapters about his impromptu lessons on astronomy, weather and ancient history is to feel with renewed intensity the tragedy of the cavernous, regimented testing factories we sentence our children to nowadays. 'If only I could bottle it for every teacher under my jurisdiction,' Paul thinks, 'the fluid passion Morrie put into those class hours.'

As the school year progresses, we follow Paul and his siblings through the usual confrontations with older bullies and sassy girls. Most of this is sweet and funny, but sometimes the story touches on the real hardships and cruelties of desperate families living in a remote, unforgiving land.

Doig has been at this for a long time; he's 67 and the author of eight previous novels and three works of nonfiction, including the memoir 'This House of Sky.' You can see the evidence of that experience in his new novel: its gentle pace, its persistent warmth, its complete freedom from cynicism — and the confidence to take those risks without winking or apologizing. When a voice as pleasurable as his evokes a lost era, somehow it doesn't seem so lost after all.

Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

"Doig blends a coming of age story and late-life reflection to luminous effect....[A]nother memorable tale set in the historical West but contemporary in its themes and universal in its insights into the human heart." Seattle Times

"This is an affectionate, heartwarming tale that also celebrates a vanished way of life and laments its passing." Library Journal

"Doig's story centers on the impact of these unconventional siblings on simple rural lives." Kirkus Reviews

"An entrancing new chapter in the literature of the West." Booklist

Ivan Doig is the author of ten previous books, including the novels Prairie Nocturne and Dancing at the Rascal Fair. A former ranch hand, newspaperman, and magazine editor, Doig holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. He lives in Seattle.