If you’ve read
anything by Ivan Doig and you’re not an Ivan Doig fan, please call me—you’ve
slipped out of our universe and I’d like to help you on your return trip, I’ll
just stick out my hand holding one of his books, and you can grab it….
This honest man of Montana
died this week. I think he’ll be buried barefoot, because his shoes will be
heading to the Smithsonian—no one is going to fill them, that’s for sure.
I came late to the
Ivan Doig idiom. I think I read This
House of Sky about 20 years ago, a wholly memorable event, it’s one of
those “I can’t put it down” books. Doig was a master of investing people into
places, and creating places I’d love to see, even if I wouldn’t be strong
enough to live in them. Doig’s characters are richly human, profoundly
guileless and usually intent on doing the right thing, even when that’s a
really hard thing to do….
I read The Bartender’s Tale last summer, a full
immersion event as always. I rooted with all my heart for 12-year-old Rusty. The bartender’s son
is a magnet for life experiences, he is a perceptive if sometimes innocent
observer of what life crams into his young world, he ingenuously feels the
first throbs of grown-up sadness, young love, careless aspiration, and fear of
life-changing events that he sometimes only clumsily understands. Rusty is the
kind of character that Doig understood.
 |
| Ivan and Carol Doig |
I wouldn’t dare to say that no one can write like Ivan Doig.
I’ll knock down the man who says that Ivan Doig wasn’t special. I cherish my
memories of reading his masterful stories, and if you’re a fan, too, you know
how easily and warmly those memories come to mind.
Ivan Doig (1939-2015), requiescat in pace.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015
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