Description:
The way Jon Billman writes it, Hams Fork, Wyoming, is a kind of latter-day Cicely, Alaska. You remember Cicely, the fictional town at the heart of TV's Northern Exposure? Hams Fork, the rough-and-tumble setting for most of the stories in Billman's first collection, gives it a run for its money in sheer volume of crazy artists, tough-talking schoolteachers, and plain old ornery cusses. This is a town where painting a rainbow-hued bare-chested mermaid on the water tower in the middle of the night qualifies as a major event. In Hams Fork, the men are boys, and are they ever bored. They chase away their boredom with drinking and adultery and doing stupid things in the wilderness. Billman knows his terrain: his obvious first-hand experience of his characters' more esoteric pastimes--firefighting, mead-making, dogsled racing--makes for an abundance of satisfying detail. And gear fetishists will find passages hand-fashioned for their consumption: "The sled was beautiful, in the same linear way that antique gun stocks, oak letter desks, old saddles, bamboo fly rods, handmade cowboy boots, beavertail snowshoes, and wooden skies are beautiful." Billman's writing lets out a lonesome cowboy yowl that seems written expressly to the escapist fantasy specs of the city-bound dude. He's a Pam Houston for boys. As handily as Billman pulls off his portrait of a Western town, he has set out to do more: to limn the rootlessness and loneliness of the modern-day West itself. One character "has ridden Hams Fork to exhaustion. Just up and leaving is acceptable, expected in the West." But the author's chin-scratching search for meaning seldom yields more than the most hackneyed revelations. A little less of this predictable angst and a little more of his (very evident) comedic talents would have made this fine book a first-class read. --Claire Dederer
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