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Review by Alice Cary
Sheriff Jack Nevelsen is summoned on a Saturday night: a car accident has claimed two victims. Since it's graduation day, he assumes teenagers have been partying, drinking and driving too fast.
He's only half right. One of the victims is indeed a graduate, a shy, sad girl named June Moss. The car's driver, however, is none other than Leo Bauer, the respected principal of the town's junior high school. The fact that this married man and father appears to have been running away with a student -- both passengers had packed suitcases in the car -- throws Sheriff Nevelsen's social equilibrium entirely off balance. What's more, he can't help feeling somehow personally responsible for the pair of white crosses that will ultimately pop up along the highway accident site under his jurisdiction.
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A married man appears to have run away with a student. |
Watson sets his drama in the town of Bentrock, Montana, in 1958, probing similar turf and themes he so deftly explored in a previous novel, "Montana 1948." Once again, the plot centers on a sheriff's badge and the eternal, seemingly unwinnable battle to maintain righteousness, family loyalties and public order. And once more, Watson's prose and characterizations are as tightly wrought and fast paced as a cowboy's lariat, twisting and turning in unexpected directions, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats.
Larry Watson's central character reminds me of two recent movie peacekeepers: the hero of John Sayles' "Lone Star" and the pregnant policewoman so wonderfully portrayed by Frances McDormand in "Fargo." All three characters relentlessly probe deaths that have occurred on their heartland of America turf. But while the two screen stars relentlessly try to unravel the truth of a crime, Nevelsen doggedly tries to hide the truth behind two deaths.
Nevelsen himself muses that while lawmen in television shows and movies carry out their duties with fists, guns and car chases, his biggest task is a mountain of paperwork. He elaborates, explaining: "What would people say about him as sheriff if he told them the hardest part of the job was not scraping bodies across the highway or wrestling raving drunks into the tank or even breaking bad news to widows, but making sure the right lies get told?"
Jack Nevelsen is as intriguing a literary personality as I've encountered lately, with a big heart in the right place but actions completely off target. As it turns out, the sexual longings and temptations that he so desperately wants to shield from his citizenry turn out to be none but his very own, and, ultimately, his downfall.
Watson once remarked that his writing probes "the dark side of Lake Wobegon." His description is perfect. "White Crosses" is a novel full of small-town hopes and dreams set in a place where waters run deep and chilling. This excellent novel delivers a mean punch.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.