TRAPLINES

A lyrical memoir of country life, and a requiem, of sorts, for one of the last best places.

Story-writer Rember (English/Albertson Coll.; Cheerleaders from Gomorrah, 1994, etc.) opens his narrative with an invitingly well-handled anecdote from his youth involving a chance encounter with Ernest Hemingway on a snowy Idaho lane. It ends sadly, as indeed did Hemingway’s life, but also with a matter-of-fact simplicity that perfectly fits its rural setting: tragic though it may be, life goes on, and so do our stories. Now in his early 50s, Rember weaves past and present, dropping in here to recall his trapper/fishing-guide father’s efforts to carve a living out of wilderness, there to ponder what became of that wilderness once the word got out to Hollywood that the skiing there was good and the people compliant; among the sometimes spectral characters who figure in his pages are a dissatisfied banker friend who is forever trying to convert Rember to the cause of making money; another friend who, having suffered a brain injury in a climbing accident, slowly rebuilds his memories and skills; and a student with a “not-very-good brain” who, before Rember’s eyes, ruins a car that cost well more than he earns in a year. From these and other figures fine and flawed, Rember draws moral lessons rendered in nicely epigrammatic, often humorous turns: “I had learned that the magic can fall out of things and that you can be involved in rites of passage that turn out to be all about somebody else.” “Bliss, Idaho, is just like Saudi Arabia. . . . Except in Bliss, the wind blows harder and the people aren’t any fun.”

Plenty authentic: a graceful addition to the literature of the American West, and a pleasure to read.