Book Review : Witty, Detailed Chronicle of Two Montana Families

The Corner of Rife and Pacific by Thomas Savage (Morrow: $16.95; 226 pages)

What reader doesn’t delight in a strong and graceful style; in following the fortunes of distinctive characters involved in a plausible plot? By all rights, Thomas Savage should be a household word like Kleenex or Band-Aid; each new book a media event, sales figures trumpeted in the trade papers; “Savage” the generic for the major literary values.

As matters stand, Savage’s 12 critically acclaimed previous novels have won him a devoted coterie, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the kind of psychic rewards that come from continually surpassing himself at his chosen profession. Splendid, but a book isn’t like a vacation hideaway or a small and special restaurant. Fame doesn’t spoil books--the millionth reader enjoys himself as much as the first.

The corner of Rife and Pacific is in Grayling, Mont., a frontier town just large enough to hold two leading families, the Metlens and the Connards. Beginning in 1890, the book chronicles the complex relationships between the two clans during the next 30 years. Both families came to Montana from California after the Gold Rush, eager to invest their profits. The Metlens became ranchers; the Connards bankers; choices offering the maximum potential for dramatic conflict.

Spirited and Independent

John Metlen has married the spirited and independent daughter of a San Francisco surgeon, whose trousseau not only includes a parlor organ, but “a camera with a black hood to throw over the head to keep out light, stacks of plates, jars of gelatin, bottles of acid and silver chloride.” Before her marriage, Lizzie had been a teacher in the newly established Indian schools, earning so much respect that when the camera arrived, the Tehachapi chief sat for his portrait. When the photograph appeared in a national magazine, “The pride and despair in the old man’s eyes were haunting: he knew that the Indians’ number was up.”

In addition to managing his ranchlands, John Metlen built Grayling’s first hotel, a state-of-the-art structure with a bathroom for each 10 rooms and stout coils of rope provided so guests could slide down from their windows in case of fire. Having heard that telephone wires would soon be strung down from Butte, Metlen even installed bells to summon clients to the front desk once the service was available. Topping the solid building was the supreme symbol of Metlen’s visionary turn of mind, a yellow brick tower nearly 100 feet high, decorated simply with the family name cut into a sandstone slab.

The accumulation of these telling details not only creates a hyper-realistic setting, but also defines the personality of the characters. All you need to know about the banker Connard is the fact that when a young laborer’s leg was crushed in the process of installing the bank’s foot-thick steel doors, Connard paid him off “right on the street with good American currency” and took a release for “value received.” The entire man is there in a single sentence.

Two-Generation Novel

With the birth of John and Lizzie’s son, Zack, “The Corner of Rife and Pacific” becomes a two-generation novel, with Connard’s boy providing the counterpoint. In accordance with the unwritten tradition of Western literature, the conflict between the idealistic and sensitive Metlens and the crass and arrogant Connard is established early and maintained throughout, though with uncommon subtlety and wry humor. Readers expecting the mandatory showdown won’t be disappointed, though the scene itself departs radically from the standard form.

Because family relationships are Savage’s strong point, the book concentrates upon the development of young Zack Metlen, whose personality is a discreet lesson in genetic determination. Though the plot is a relatively simple matter of the effect of good luck and bad upon the Metlens, the texture and mood of a small Western town in the first decades of the century is so perfectly created that the limited amount of action seems enough. Savage hasn’t invited us to be passive spectators at a Wild West spectacle, but involved participants in these particular Western lives.