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Summary
Summary
In the tradition of such classics as My Ántonia and There Will Be Blood , Anna Keesey's Little Century is a resonant and moving debut novel by a writer of confident gifts.
Orphaned after the death of her mother, eighteen-year-old Esther Chambers heads west in search of her only living relative. In the lawless frontier town of Century, Oregon, she's met by her distant cousin, a laconic cattle rancher named Ferris Pickett. Pick leads her to a tiny cabin by a small lake called Half-a-Mind, and there she begins her new life as a homesteader. If she can hold out for five years, the land will join Pick's already impressive spread.
But Esther discovers that this town on the edge of civilization is in the midst of a range war. There's plenty of land, but somehow it is not enough for the ranchers--it's cattle against sheep, with water at a premium. In this charged climate, small incidents of violence swiftly escalate, and Esther finds her sympathies divided between her cousin and a sheepherder named Ben Cruff, a sworn enemy of the cattle ranchers. As her feelings for Ben and for her land grow, she begins to see she can'tbe loyal to both.
Little Century maps our country's cutthroat legacy of dispossession and greed, even as it celebrates the ecstatic visions of what America could become.
Author Notes
Anna Keesey is a graduate of Stanford University and of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories . She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and has held residencies at MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and Provincetown. Keesey teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When 18-year-old orphan Esther Chambers heads west in 1896 to live with her last surviving relative, she is timid and twitchy-and narrator Tavia Gilbert skillfully portrays those qualities. Creating a voice that is self-conscious and wistful, Gilbert perfectly captures the slightly traumatized and wistful Esther. For the novel's many male characters, Gilbert depicts the rough accents and slowed cadences of the American West without resorting to cowboy caricature. She also does a masterful job in her portrayal of Pick, Esther's distant cousin, who has big dreams for the tiny Oregon outpost called Century. In the novel's highly emotional conclusion, however, Gilbert's characterization of Esther falls flat. The character has changed dramatically over the course of the story, but the narrator's interpretation remains largely the same. The girlish vocalization Gilbert uses so successfully at the beginning of the novel fails to match Esther's newfound courage and confidence. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The title refers to a little town in the midst of the vastness of Oregon, where at the turn of the 20th century, sheepmen and cattlemen vie for grazing territory as well as for the love of 18-year-old Esther Chambers. Recently orphaned, Esther travels from Chicago in search of Ferris "Pick" Pickett, a distant relative about 10 years older than she is. Pick is friendly but taciturn, and he takes her out to Half-a-Mind, a property that had recently been abandoned by a farmer. Through Pick, Esther finds out that if she can live in Half-a-Mind at least six months out of the year for five years, she can claim it as her own, so she begins to homestead. Esther quickly discovers that much of the conflict out West lies in the hatred between cattlemen and sheepmen, for they're constantly fighting about who has the rights to free rangeland. At first the tension emerges as petty violence--windows broken by slingshots--but it soon escalates to a much more serious level with hooded cattlemen driving hundreds of sheep over a bluff to their deaths and a retaliatory action in which a prize bull is beheaded. Amidst this growing violence Esther finds herself attracted to Pick, cautious spokesperson for the cattlemen, and Ben Cruff, a sheepman who almost by definition is hostile to the cattle ranchers. Keesey introduces us to a large cast of Oregonians here, including Joe Peaslee, whose apparent suicide might have actually been murder; Violet Fowler, a postmistress whose snoopiness leads her to open any interesting letter that comes her way; and Mr. Elliot, of the Far West Navigation and Railway, who's investigating the possibility of establishing a spur line to Century and thus ensuring its continued economic viability. Keesey writes lyrically and examines the ferocity of frontier life with an unromantic and penetrating gaze.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THERE are staples we've come to expect in the American frontier novel: unlikely homesteaders, stoic farmhands and scheming railroad men; unchecked ambitions, mysterious pasts and vigilante justice. Winter always seems to be looming. Or summer. Somebody will probably divulge a secret to a horse or a child. Mishandled, these western standbys can seem like threadbare, dime-novel clichés. Handled deftly, these conventions are the stuff of American myth. The line is finer than one might think. While Anna Keesey's first novel, "Little Century," may walk a well-worn path, the familiar is rendered vividly through fluid and restrained prose, solid plotting and a keen eye for detail. The little town of Century is trying to eke out a living in the high desert of eastern Oregon when 18-year-old Esther Chambers arrives in the fledgling outpost, an orphan in search of her only known relative - a distant cousin named Ferris Pickett. Esther soon learns that Pick, a cattleman, is Century's major benefactor and chief citizen. As the story opens, he's lobbying for the railroad to bring a freight line through Century, which he hopes will improve the town's fortunes along with his own. Pick, at once charismatic and controlling, is perhaps the novel's most fascinating character, because his considerable moral contradictions and questionable motives are convincingly ambiguous. Pick enlists Esther, under false pretenses, to help him take control of "the town's major water supply for livestock. He persuades her to file a claim (illegally) on Half-a-Mind, a playa lake on the edge of town. Grazing land and watering holes mean everything in this parched region, where cattlemen and shepherds compete - not so peacefully, it seems. In fact, Esther quickly recognizes that in spite of what appears to be an abundance of land, there's a range war going on. And her little homestead is the battlefield. "Little Century" is packed with distinctive personalities, some of whom you might recognize - the eccentric and endearingly Dickensian shop owner, the distinguished reverend, the cold-blooded villain, the stubbornly independent schoolteacher and the long-suffering horse (named, in this case, for the Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway). Keesey, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, treads this familiar territory competently, imbuing her characters with palpable motives, rich contradictions and fully realized pasts. She also stays atop the rising action of the story, upping the stakes for her characters and the town of Century as she herds us efficiently toward the conclusion. At the same time, she knows not to hurry readers along without letting them soak up the atmosphere. The real star of the novel is Oregon's high desert, a vast, quiet plain Keesey captures in many of its dynamic moods, in language ranging from the plainspoken to the elegant Esther observes the lay of the land after arriving: "As far as she might walk to, or even see, to one side or the other, all is gray and sleeping under a shiver-thin coverlet of old snow." And like all well-wrought settings, Keesey's high desert has woven itself into the fabric of its inhabitants, as it has for Pick: "He remembered, always, the desert of his childhood. The vast quiet, the singular negotiations between a cold, calm man and a colder, calmer plain." This ever-present landscape, flat, serene and seemingly endless, makes for an uncluttered backdrop, serving the action well while not distracting with its grandeur. The same could be said of Keesey's writing. Save for an occasional lyric flourish, her language serves the story admirably, rarely crossing the line into the selfconscious, the sentimental or the flashy. In short, Keesey is a sentence writer in control of her craft. She's a storyteller who stays out of her own way. She's not one to frustrate traditional narrative structures. "Little Century" is clearly a novel of incident, in which one action leads to a greater reaction, escalating decisively as the final, inevitable conflict draws nearer. Here, greed and grudge take their place at center stage, while humanity's better instincts whisper and bite their cuticles on the sideline, helpless to mount much of a defense. BEFORE long, Century is, as Esther puts it, "a wayward boy running wild." And a vengeful wayward boy at that: windows are shattered, wagons are burned and heavy tolls are extracted in the war over grazing lands. Forced to wrestle with her own naïveté and idealism, Esther ultimately finds her sympathies and loyalty split between her cousin (and his fellow cattlemen) and the shepherd Ben Cruff, a young rival to whom she finds herself irresistibly drawn. Keesey navigates the reader through it all confidently. There will be blood. And romance. And meddling journalists. And yes, there will be opiates, too. Much of what you read may feel a bit familiar, but you will be engaged and nudged forward skillfully. Keesey hits few false notes, and her writing engenders confidence and trust. If there is something missing in her vision, it may be the future, or the hope of redemption. A grim sense of the inevitable threatens to leave the reader a little deflated, even as one turns the pages briskly. The violence and foreboding that pervade "Little Century" more closely resemble the western in its revisionist guise than in its romantic form. As "Little Century," spurred on by dispossession and greed, hurtles toward its conclusion, Esther Chambers arrives at a realization that could serve as the thesis of Keesey's novel: "The past of this Oregon - settlers duped, children abandoned, Indians deported and murdered - this past guaranteed that someday this band of sheep would be destroyed. Domination begets domination. How can it end? Only justice can pacify history. And justice is hard to come by." Though the book is somewhat bleak in its vision, neither Keesey's voice, nor the temperament of her prose, nor the savage nature of her villains, has the oppressive gravity of, say, Cormac McCarthy's dark hinterlands, where babies are eaten (routinely, it seems), and devils stalk the earth in human form. Moreover, Keesey peppers her scenes with enough levity and peripheral beauty to counterbalance the novel's grim machinations. Still, she does not paint a rosy picture of frontier life in eastern Oregon at the turn of the 20th century, nor, in the moral scheme of things, does she deliver her heroes and villains far from where they started - that is, in the middle of nowhere. 'Only justice can pacify history,' Keesey's heroine realizes. 'And justice is hard to come by.' Jonathan Evison's latest novel, "The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving," will be published in August.
Library Journal Review
In the year 1900, at age 18, newly orphaned Esther Chambers leaves Chicago for the high desert of Oregon. Her distant cousin, a cattle rancher named Pick, steers her into claiming a homestead adjoining his land. He assures her that eventually he will buy it from her. At first Esther feels lonely and alienated, but once she gets to know her cousin and their neighbors in the small town of Century, she feels more at home. She learns to ride a horse and takes up typewriting and typesetting. Although Esther tries to stay out if it, she is swept up in escalating tensions between the cattle ranchers and sheep farmers. With an eye toward marriage, Pick begins to appreciate Esther's amicable intelligence. But Esther has started to care for one of the young sheep farmers. Then a murder turns the town inside out. VERDICT How Esther perseveres and finds her place among the buckaroos and an assortment of oddball settlers makes for highly entertaining reading. First novelist Keesey has produced a top-notch novel of Western Americana.-Keddy Ann Outlaw, formerly with Harris Cty. P.L., Houston, TX (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.