I recently read Joe Wilkin’s 2019 novel Fall Back Down When I Die, and I was struck by his powerful and clear-eyed rendering of the American West. He is a fellow University of Idaho Creative Writing alum, and I first encountered his work through his first full-length poetry collection, Killing the Murnion Dogs. It was a pleasure to read his first novel, and I soon found myself lost in the story.
The novel is set in contemporary Montana and delves into the inner lives of Wendell Newman, a young ranch hand, and the seven-year-old boy he suddenly finds himself responsible for when his cousin is arrested for drug use and child neglect. With no other family to take in the boy, Wendell is charged with raising him, and the two soon form an unlikely bond. But with the state’s first legal wolf hunt in thirty years looming, long simmering political tensions in the small Western community threaten to unearth and revive a violent past that tangles the deaths of Wendell’s father and a local game warden.
Throughout, Wilkins’ training as a poet shines through in his prose, a precision of language that captures the beautiful, the violent, and the mundane in equal measures. I could taste and smell the Montana he renders, and though it is not the American West I would like to believe in, it is a vision of the West that feels true from the first word to the last as Wilkins’ explicates the complicated legacy of a culture predicated on the hollow promises and violence inherent in Westward Expansion.
He also withholds judgement, depicting all of his characters with compassion and an eye to detail akin to that of a skilled portrait painter. He allows the reader to make their own decisions about the moral and philosophical questions that shade the story. I found myself most compelled by Wendell’s struggle to make sense of his life (a recently dead mother, a pile of debt, an anemic ranch, a long absent father) and to decide what sort of man he wants to be as he shoulders responsibility for a child left mute and traumatized by the short-comings of the adults in this broken world.
Perhaps the aspect of Wilkins’ writing that most intrigues me is his ability to explore the darkness present in the rural West while also demonstrating a love for the landscape and the people who inhabit it. He meditates on the nature of masculinity in this place, an experience I, as a woman, have only ever been able to witness from the outside. Similarly, his unflinching examination of the costs of the poverty and violence bred by the complex history of the American West shows me a side of my place of belonging that I have rarely experienced first hand — though my grandfathers and maternal grandmother all grew up in abject poverty in this region, by the time I was born, my family was part of the educated, professional class in Wyoming, and that background shaped the lens through which I see the state and landscape. Therefore, I am grateful to writers and artists like Wilkins, who pull back the veil on my more idealized version of the American West. Without this perspective, my understanding of my choice to continue to live and love this place is incomplete.
In the end, that is the greatest achievement of Wilkins’ novel — it is a story that strives to provide a complete picture of a community and its history and explicate how those forces shape the people who inhabit it.
For more about Joe Wilkins and his work, visit his website: https://joewilkins.org/
I found these two interviews with The Write Question on Montana Public Radio to be particularly enlightening as I digested Fall Back Down When I Die: https://beta.prx.org/stories/96338-an-interview-with-joe-wilkins; https://beta.prx.org/stories/282384
