The Entire Sky by Joe Wilkins

Published by ‎ Little, Brown and Company on July 2, 2024

The Entire Sky is a story of choices, primarily the choice between suicide and endurance, but also the choice to notice when people need help or to leave them unseen, to help those we see or to condemn them. The story is heartwarming because good people dealing with tough circumstances, including poor decisions they've made in the past, decide to make the right choices.

Justin lived in Seattle. He wasn’t big enough to protect his mother from her boyfriend’s physical abuse, but he tried. His mother didn’t have the physical strength to protect Justin from her boyfriend’s retaliation and didn’t have the emotional strength to make her boyfriend leave. So Justin left instead, running away at first, later going to Montana to live with his mother’s brother Heck.

As the novel begins, Justin is running away again, this time to avoid the consequences of caving in Heck’s head with a maul. Justin’s backstory leading to that violent moment is interwoven with the story that unfolds in the present.

A key to Justin’s personality is his physical resemblance to Kurt Cobain and his love of Nirvana’s music. Apart from committing a murder (and nobody will be sorry about Heck’s death), Justin is polite, kind, and respectful — a young man readers will easily like.

With his guitar and a backpack, Justin hitchhikes to Billings, where he earns a few dollars busking. He doesn’t understand why people appreciate his “tribute” to Cobain until he reads about Cobain’s death in a newspaper. Justin’s travels end when a rancher finds him hiding in a bunkhouse and leaves him breakfast.

The rancher is Rene Bouchard. He’s old and battling pain in his knees, but he still tends his flock of sheep. His wife has just died. His daughter Lianne returned to Montana to help her father care for her dying mother. Lianne teaches at a community college but has separated from her husband and isn’t sure she wants to return to her former job, particularly after she shags Ves, her old friend from high school.

Justin is astonished at how easily he fits in at Rene’s ranch. He loves watching lambs being born although he is appalled by the harsh realities of Rene's business. Rene and Lianne display decency and kindness that Justin has rarely experienced. Ves’ daughter Amy shares Justin’s appreciation of Nirvana’s music. Justin is even thinking of enrolling in school under a new name, but remaking a life is never easy. Justin will have more than his share of troubles to overcome as the novel moves toward a resolution.

Suicide is the novel’s primary theme. Cobain’s is probably the most notable celebrity suicide of his generation, the most notable in American life since Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe. Rene is planning to end his life when Justin’s sudden arrival causes him to postpone his death. Justin reminds Rene of his son Franklin, who also committed suicide. The novel asks why so many boys choose to take their own lives, why American society fails to identify and help them.

Prejudice against gay men, harbored by Montanans who think of themselves as cowboys, is a secondary theme. Justin isn’t gay, but his long hair and earrings make him gay in the eyes of rednecks. Men like Heck who are ashamed of their attraction to other men use violence as a substitute for self-awareness. Franklin was gay and was targeted by other boys (and even some girls) despite his efforts to hide his sexual identity.

A third theme is the difficult relationship between fathers and sons, particularly when fathers (like Rene) find it difficult to express (or even feel) their emotions. Rene blames himself for Franklin’s suicide, as does Lianne for not responding more urgently to Franklin’s cries for help. They both regret that they didn’t listen to him.

Joe Wilkins conveys the unassuming lives of his Montana characters, finding virtue in their hard work and unselfish lives. Without wasting words, he strings together robust sentences to tell a powerful story. He calls attention to all the boys we don’t notice, the boys who succeed at being too small to see, the boys who drift, who sleep in the weeds or in the back seat of an abandoned car or, if they are very lucky, on a friend’s couch for a few nights. The story reminds us that we can look away when we see them, or we can see them as possibilities.

I didn’t try to guess how the story would end but I dreaded a realistic outcome. Wilkins satisfied me by offering two endings, perhaps to emphasize that life is about possibilities and choices. One is a little sad but far from hopeless. The one I preferred is closer to happy. Either one is a fitting conclusion to a powerful story.

RECOMMENDED

Fall Back Down When I Die by Joe Wilkins

Published by Little, Brown and Company on March 12, 2019

Fall Back Down When I Die takes place in and near the Bull Mountains in Montana. It follows three primary characters who connect to each other in ways that become clear by the novel’s midpoint.

Vern is determined to live in the mountains as a free man after committing a crime. He tells his story in the form of a letter to his son. Most of Vern’s letters are rants about the perceived injustice that has been (or will be) done to him because of his insistence that he had the right to do as he pleased on his own land.

At some point after Wendell Newman becomes a young adult, his mother dies, leaving him a trailer and a mortgage on their mountain farmland. A social worker places a seven-year-old named Rowdy Burns with Wendell because Rowdy’s mother Lacy is Wendell’s cousin and was like a sister to him before she became a drug addict and then a prisoner. Rowdy was left alone in Lacy’s apartment for a week before social services took custody of him. Rowdy has developmental and behavioral issues that Wendell isn’t well equipped to handle, but he’s willing to do his best because he knows what it means to be neglected.

Gillian Houlton is a widow; her daughter Maddy is a high school senior. Gillian is an assistant principal in a town that consists of churches, saloons, and empty storefronts. She sees local kids growing up in rural poverty, living off rural welfare (farm programs, government grazing leases), joining self-proclaimed militias and White Identity movements, doing willfully stupid things that land them in jail or lead to an early death, proudly eschewing education and voting against their own interests. The principal, on the other hand, would rather sacrifice a kid than make redneck parents mad, because they might begin homeschooling and the school cannot sustain a significant loss of pupils.

Gillian’s husband, a game warden, was the victim of Bull Mountains violence a dozen years earlier. Gillian is sick of violent and ignorant men who believe they have the moral right to violate the law without considering the consequences to their families, to the environment, or to future generations. She sees eastern Montana (other than Billings) as “a sinkhole for taxpayer dollars, a sick sinkhole of environmental degradation, lack of education, liquor, methamphetamine, and broken families” while working Montanans who value education spend their time trying to clean up the mess. As a teacher, she’s frustrated with parents who condemn their children to a lifetime of ignorance and squalor. Anyone who gains an appreciation of the rest of world is condemned as “forgetting where they came from.”

Fall Back Down When I Die exposes the ignorant selfishness of people who think they are entitled by land ownership and mistaken notions of personal freedom to disregard laws that apply equally to every member of society. Yet the novel is not a political diatribe. Regardless of the merit that land use regulations have, they can make life for difficult for people whose businesses are affected by them, as the novel illustrates in the form of a very decent rancher who is just trying to make a good life for his family and employees.

The novel also has a lesson to teach regarding the peril of making assumptions about people because of how or where they live. Gillian has good reason to be angry with Montanans on the far right, but the story teaches that judging people based on stereotypes leads to misjudgments, no matter where the stereotypes fall on the political spectrum. Whether the hater is on the left or right, hate destroys.

Gillian and Wendell are constructed in satisfying depth, while characters who play significant but smaller roles are surprisingly complex. Perhaps the story’s message is a bit heavy-handed, but the message is important. The plot builds tension effectively until it reaches a surprising climax. The story is sad in the way that life is often sad, and hopeful in the way that life needs to be so that decent people don’t give up on humanity.

RECOMMENDED