The Last Crossing

The writing becomes steadily more engaging as the story progresses. Vanderhaeghe refuses to conform to standard historical fiction in several ways. First, not much actually happens in the story (two brothers set off with a few other folks in 1876 Montana, searching for the third bro who has gone missing), and he still manages to keep it engaging. The majority of the plot is spent wandering around the Montana prairie, and the various characters ruminate on things like stars, grass, and each othe...and yet you want to keep reading to find out what the others think. Which brings me to my second point--Vanderhaeghe's narrative structure. Curiously, Vanderhaeghe chooses a very Faulkner-esque mode of narration. Each chapter is split between several characters who tell the story for a few pages from their perspective--much like As I Lay Dying. Unlike Faulkner, however, Vanderhaeghe's character voices are often indistinguishable from one another, despite the fact that one is a woman, one is English, one is a half-blooded Blackfoot who is supposed to have bad English skills, another is Irish, and so one. You would think their dialects and individual cadences would vary substantially...sadly, this is not the case, which was a bit disappointing. We are also unclear who each person is addressing in each section. They are all written in the past tense, often with reflective tones that seem to be speaking from quite a few years later: "I knew it was going to have to be that way" sort of thing. Yet by the end of the novel, more than one character is dead. Are they excerpted journal entries? If so, why didn't Vanderhaeghe just take the plunge and write as an epistolary novel, opening himself up a whole new way of distinguishing characters via their obviously varying literacy levels?

Structural issues aside, the novel itself is quite engaging. Although the non-traditional protagonists (the Indian, the female) that Vanderhaeghe attempts to write are not always as complex as the white male characters, the entire narrative drives well--as a reader, I wanted to know what was going to happen next. As a novel that isn't quite historical fiction or literary fiction, The Last Crossing takes some chances that pay off enough to where its weaknesses can, for the most part, be forgiven.