IDAHO (Penguin Random House 2017) by Emily Ruskovich is such a delightful, masterful, brilliant, expansive, heartbreaking jewel of a novel, and the rightful winner of the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award (decided by librarians and readers the world over). This unforgettable story with a family tragedy at its heart, is conveyed to the reader mostly not through the main characters but through those at the peripheries of this family’s life, in a series of almost novellas, told from different points of view and different time periods, that together reveal the terrible events at the centre of the novel. It is a brave and unusual structure, and the perspective of looking at the tragedy from differing perspectives rather than head-on, allows the scope of the event to be greater than the sum of its parts.
The terrible, unflinching, desperate act at the heart of this book is almost too sad to contemplate: one hot August day, a family drives to the mountain to collect birch wood. The mother, Jenny, and the father, Wade, chop and stack the wood, while their two daughters June (aged nine) and May (aged six) play imaginary games and argue and drink lemonade. But then the absolutely unthinkable happens, an incident so extreme, brutal and damaging that it will change this family forever in ways they could never foresee.
Rather than show us this event directly, the author chooses other people to tell vignettes of their lives that have – in many different ways – overlapped with those of this central family. We hear from Ann, Wade’s subsequent partner in later life. We learn the story of imprisoned inmate Elizabeth. We see Wade as a young man. Jenny as a younger woman, before it all went terribly wrong. Six-year-old May. An older couple, William and Beth, the first to arrive at the horrific scene. Adam, Wade’s father. Eliot, a boy without a leg. A woman who repays a great debt. And we travel from 2005 to 2008, from1985 to 1995, from 2006 to 1999, from 1973 to 2007 to 2009 to 2011, to 2024 to 2025. In this circuitous, roundabout way, we view the central incident from many perspectives and times, each viewpoint adding more layers to the information we have about what happened and why.
Exploring themes of loss, grief, dementia, the natural world, the passing of years, incarceration, punishment, retribution, forgiveness, and unanswerable mysteries, this haunting, gripping, compassionate book is written in lyrical and spare prose, forever circling the terrible violence that occurs, and looking at it as if from a kaleidoscope of ever-changing patterns. The characters are empathetic, lonely, misunderstood, awkward, resentful, remorseful and changed. The landscape is one of great beauty but harsh circumstances. The events are irrevocable, transformative and life-changing.
I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. What an extraordinary piece of writing; the fact that it’s Ruskovich’s debut novel is an amazing feat. I believe she has just published a short story collection, Nightjar, which is going straight to my TBR list.