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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
July 29, 1999
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1999 Plains Folk
Lannie, abandoned by her father, was raised by her Aunt Iris and Uncle Barney, prairie farmers, big successful ones. She left Saskatchewan for college and went on from there without forwarding addresses, another farm girl fleeing the prairie, but faster and farther than most. In the initial chapter of "The Garden of Eden," Sharon Butala's new novel (HarperCollins Canada), we find Lannie doing relief work for a non-governmental agency in Ethiopia.
Reading "Garden of Eden" made my heart hurt. Sharon hails from Eastend, Saskatchewan, the village which two generations earlier generated another great writer, Wallace Stegner. (In fact, when my wife and I visited Eastend, Sharon and her rancher-husband, Peter, were kind enough to show us around Stegner sites in the vicinity.)
Butala has published a remarkable trilogy of novels about ranch life and the making and breaking of farms and towns in southwest Saskatchewan, the third volume of which, "The Fourth Archangel," is like a primer on how prairie towns come apart. Her reflective work, "The Perfection of the Morning," is, I would argue, the most significant autobiography ever written by a plainswoman. This woman has deep insights into regional life.
The ones she writes into "Garden of Eden" are disquieting. Iris embarks on a search to find her lost niece and bring her home. The quest is prompted by the death of her husband, which also injects into the novel a stark treatment of what it means to be a widow in a prairie town. The loss of status, the drift to the margin of town society that so often accompanies widowhood is faced directly, a style not comfortable for folks around here. Iris's eventual success in demanding respect and taking control of her own affairs does not erase the reader's discomfort.
A few weeks ago I wrote a column that has brought some mail to my box. In it I said that we ought to stop bragging about our strong family values here on the northern plains, because people everywhere love their families, and so many of our families seem to be coming apart. Some people said it's about time to face up to this, others thought I must be kidding, and still others insisted I was just wrong.
In Sharon's "Garden of Eden," families are not what they seem. It turns out that spouses are not necessarily faithful, parents responsible, elders wise, or neighbors loyal. Most children grow up and leave, and those people remaining disagree about how to use the land or sustain the community.
I knew that this book was going to feed me some painful truths when I got into the second chapter, wherein the women of the community gather at the Chinook community hall for an annual strawberry tea held every year for a community cause. The strawberries are tasteless lumps from California, and the cause benefitted by the affair is the community cemetery. Iris enters the hall, and her head starts to ache: "Then, still leaning against the wall of the dimly lit cloakroom, her raincoat partly unbuttoned, she lets her arms fall to her sides, her head drift back to rest against the fake wood, and closes her eyes." The images and feelings here are just too true.
There are things about Sharon Butala's writing and her vision of life on the plains that I don't necessarily accept. For one thing, she's so darned self-consciously Canadian at times, exhibiting a sort of save-the-world moralism that's a bit wearisome, and not just to Americans. For another, she embraces prairie restoration--the wholesale reconversion of cropland to grassland--at the same time she envisions community revival, and for the life of me, I can't see how that's going to work.
Whereas I may quibble with her prescriptions, I think her a master diagnostician. Read "The Garden of Eden," and think about your own place on the plains.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable
for printing.
(isern.tif - 512KB b&w photo)
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable for printing.
(isern-h.tif - 426KB b&w photo)