NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
July 16, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1998 Plains Folk
Regular readers notice I frequently review new books about life on the plains in this column. This is worth doing because people on the plains do more than their share of reading, and they tell me they are particularly interested in books about their own part of the country.
There are two types of books I review here. First, books that originate in the region, from our own local and university presses. Second, books that come from far away and are published by the big commercial presses, mainly New York houses.
"Goodnight, Nebraska" is one of the latter. The author of the novel lives in California, and the book is published by Random House, New York. A book like this is going to be reviewed in the New York Times and in literary magazines and will get a good combing by sophisticated critics. So what can I, just a reader from the plains, add to the discussion? Well, I know something about how we live in these parts, and so the first thing I ask is, "Is the book true to the culture of the plains?" I don't mean is it romantic or realistic or anything like that, but rather, does it show a comfortable familiarity with the circumstances and details of life here, and put these elements together plausibly?
"Goodnight" does pretty well on this score. It begins with this young fellow, Randall Hunsacker, the product of what we call these days a dysfunctional family, who gets in trouble in Utah and is shipped off to western Nebraska to finish high school and stay out of trouble. The high school football coach welcomes him because he's a hard tackler. The head cheerleader, Marcy Lockhardt, falls for him for reasons no one can fathom. They marry too young, live in a trailer, fall out, get back together, move in with her folks, take over the family farm, have a couple of kids, and start to do all right, except that there's a murder, and the girl's father commits suicide, and the mother runs off to Mexico. (How's that for a plot summary?)
Into this story McNeal packages some neat details about life on the plains. The high school football team plays eight-man ball. The young swain meets his sweetheart by the cattle guard. People have Labrador retrievers and talk about Husker football. Little things like these show the author has spent time on the plains and soaked up some things. Unfortunately he falters badly by making a pheasant hunt a pivotal episode in the plot, and while the scene might work for the New York critics, anyone from around here will sense that the guy just doesn't know how to hunt pheasants. It sounds like he maybe talked to some people about it, but never did it himself, or if he did, he went out with a hunting party from California. He also misspells "Cabela's," which no pheasant hunter would do, not even my brother.
This episode, then, mars a tale otherwise well told and true to life on the plains. The other question I always ask about a book like this, thoughmaybe I'm overly defensiveis whether it exploits people on the plains, whether it rips off regional culture for the sake of metropolitan sophisticates.
In this respect McNeal deserves high marks. He pays the people of the plains the compliment of writing about them warts and all. His "Goodnight" on the Niobrara is populated with ordinary people who do good things and make mistakes and sometimes don't even know why they do what they do. No one is all good or all bad or anyone's stereotype.
"Goodnight, Nebraska" isn't the stunner promised by its jacket, but it's a fair book and a fair likeness.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866