RED IS THE FASTEST COLOR
by Dave Carty
In Carty’s novel, a retired teacher finds purpose caring for his Parkinson’s disease-afflicted sister in rural Montana.
Jamison Everett has always been far more comfortable within the literary worlds of Rilke and Steinbeck than the one he lives in; at 72, he’s consummately lonely, retired, and living in Minneapolis on his teacher’s pension. He was never close to his younger sister, Monna, a painter long living in the rural town of Aden, Montana, with her blue-collar husband, Ben Van Hollen. But her Parkinson’s symptoms are getting worse, and they need some help around their homestead. Jamison’s relocation quickly forces him to confront his interpersonal shortcomings, including his simmering tension with Ben and his lack of emotional intimacy with his sister. Ben and Jamison are ideologically at odds; Jamison’s middle-class upbringing and higher education imbue him with a condescension he can’t quite recognize, while Ben’s working-class experience seems to preclude vulnerability or the desire for contemplation. But as time goes on, the two find common ground in their love for Monna and recognition of the other’s value in small moments. Monna, meanwhile, withdraws into herself. While the author largely stays close to Jamison’s perspective, Monna’s solitude while the men are away conveys her deep anguish and indignation at the loss of her artistic and physical abilities. Montana’s harsh winter landscape proves fertile ground for Carty’s introspective, subtle prose—the naturalistic imagery destabilizes Jamison’s inner narration and his opinion of how he’s lived his life: “There was more here than the absence of the city…in the same way that a deer hidden in tall grass vanishes maddingly when viewed with purpose and intent, he had been frustrated in his inability to see all that was here to be seen.” Some readers may find the book’s ending unsatisfying, but it offers the characters the kinds of choices their lives hadn’t yet provided.
A quietly potent rumination on the costs, and rewards, of how life ends and begins again.