Tale of Family Turmoil Set in the Rugged West

Ivan Doig’s new novel, “Mountain Time,” his sixth work of fiction, quickly announces itself as a story concerned with the West. There are the abundant references to the big names (and hearts) of Western--or naturalist--literature: Thoreau, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold, Wallace Stegner and Bob Marshall, inspiration behind Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness Preserve.

Doig also turns his attention to the Western cataclysms--the Valdez oil spill, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens--and tucks them into the characters’ back stories, sometimes credibly, sometimes with the creaky sound of a theme being spliced into a life. Inevitably, he captures the landscape, which is majestic and beautiful but at the same time corrupted, abused, endangered. Out of these bricks much Western fiction has been built, not a little by Doig himself.

Painstaking brickwork does not always lead to felicitous storytelling, however, and although there is much to admire in “Mountain Time,” especially in the relationship between its protagonist, Mitch Rozier, and his cantankerous dying father, Lyle, there are also stretches of narrative that feel under-imagined and mechanical.

A man of substantial physical bulk, Mitch Rozier has, at 50, put in 25 years at Cascopia, an alternative Seattle paper where he writes a column called “Coastwatch.” Thinking back over his life’s work during an airplane journey, Mitch reflects that he has “tried his utmost to grope his way among all of it sprawled down there--the sea-bent coastal capes, the snake routes of rivers, the strangely serene cliff-faces of dams, the faltering forests, the valleys going to suburbs, the slumbering but restless earthquake faults, the cloud-high mountains made of internal fire.”

A 50-year-old man reviewing his life’s work is bound to be thrown into some kind of crisis, as indeed Mitch eventually is. It takes rather a while for Mitch--and “Mountain Time”--to reach the taut provocations provided by the senior Rozier. Along the way, the reader meets Mitch’s girlfriend, Lexa McCaskill, a caterer to the latest Seattle cyber-millionaires, and the estranged children from his first marriage, Jocelyn (who, by moving West, becomes a somewhat more vivid, though still underexplored, presence in Mitch’s life) and Ritz (who is estranged from his father). Also on the scene are Bing, Mitch’s employer, whose paper is losing money, and Mariah, Lexa’s sister, a photojournalist who accompanies Lexa and Mitch to Lyle’s bedside to document his dying.

Mariah, unfortunately, brings out some of Doig’s less elegant writing. There is the therapy-facile motivation for her photo essay (she did not have a chance to grieve for her mother’s death); she and her sister speak in dialogue that is arch and unconvincing, and she and Mitch engage in a wholly implausible flirtation that Doig concocts to add tension to the novel’s slack last lap.

Mariah does succeed in taking some moving photographs of the expiring Lyle, and it is no wonder: He also brings out Doig’s most honest work. Lyle, with his “drill-bit way of looking at you,” is the philosophical and psychological opposite of his son. He is preoccupied with his experiences of World War II; as the owner of gravel pits in the Rocky Mountains, he is an abuser of the Western landscape who intends to abuse it further, by selling out to a company that wants to put roads down next to the Bob Marshall Wilderness in order to drill for oil; he has little finesse with, or feeling for, nature, people and his only child.

Yet he is capable of surprises too: Lyle has established a relationship (by e-mail) with Mitch’s estranged son that Mitch has not; as he dies, he changes his mind about nature and asks that his ashes be scattered over the wilderness that, his son maintains, he wanted “carved up into money.”

In these conflicts between father and son, Doig has found a plausible marriage between theme and character, setting and sentiment; they stand out as the most memorable interludes in this otherwise uneven book.