Craig Lancaster’s “The Summer Son”

I’ve had my Kindle for four years now, and I occasionally discover a downloaded book that’s at first puzzling. Did I download that? If I did, why?

That’s how I tripped over The Summer Son by Craig Lancaster, published in 2011. It was sitting in my “Books to be Read” file on my Kindle. I clicked it open and started reading, and within the first few pages knew why I had it.

This is a story about a father and son, and how they are separated by more than miles. It’s a story about the oil fields in the West, and drilling in places like the Uinta Basin in Utah. And it’s about family, and family secrets, secrets buried but still affecting the lives of people who had nothing to do with them.

I know why the book is on my Kindle. My own father worked in the oilfields.

Mitch Quillen sells medical equipment. He, his wife Cindy and twin children live in San Jose. The marriage is rocky and getting rockier. Mitch hears from his father Jim about once a year; then he hears from him three times in a week. Each call lasts less than a minute. Cindy, knowing that their marriage is tied into Mitch’s problems with his father, convinces him to fly to Billings, Montana, to see what’s happening and try to resolve the relationship.

The answer is buried in the past, and buried even further back than Mitch realizes. When Mitch was a child, he spent summers with his father. His parents were divorced; his father was an independent oilfield driller based in Billings but working all over the West. The story moves back and forth from the crucial summer of 1979, when something happened that broke the father-and-son relationship, to the current year of 2007.

Mitch will learn that the reasons for his broken relationship with his father stretch back to his father’s own childhood. And also explain his father’s two broken marriages.

Craig Lancaster

It’s a captivating story, one that asks deep questions, compelling the reader to think through his own relationship with his father, and how much he does, and doesn’t, know.

In the process, we learn a lot about the oil business and its boom-and-bust cycles, the hard and fast living of many of the people involved in it, a fair amount of oilfield profanity, and how a father and son have to face the question of whether they even want to understand each other.

Lancaster is the author of several novels and a short story collection, including Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Stories (2011); 600 Hours of Edward (2012); Edward Adrift (2013); The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (2014); and This is What I Want (2015). He lives in Montana.

A Summer Son is a seriously good story. I’m glad I found it on my Kindle.

Photograph: Utah Department of National Resources, Oil & Gas Division.

Charles Martin’s “The Mountain Between Us”

Orthopedic surgeon Ben Payne is in Salt Like City, trying to fly to Denver before a big snowstorm hits. He meets a writer, Ashley Knox, who’s trying to get home to Atlanta for her wedding. At the last minute, the flight is cancelled. But Ben is able to find a charter pilot who will fly him to Denver, and he invites Ashley to come along.

Over the Uinta Mountains, the pilot has a heart attack, but manages to crash-land the plane before he dies. When Ben regains consciousness, he knows he has broken ribs. Ashley’s leg is broken. The snow has closed in and largely buried them.

Neither Ben nor Ashley told anyone they were taking a charter flight. The pilot didn’t tell the tower he had passengers. No one will know to look for them or a plane crash. They are out of cell phone range, and far, far from anything even suggesting human activity. From the crashed plane, Ben fashions a sled to pull Ashley, and they set out into the unknown.

Charles Martin has written a number of remarkable novels that connect place and relationship – novels like Chasing Fireflies, The Dead Don’t Dance, Maggie, Wrapped in Rain, When Crickets Cry, and Where the River Ends. Martin is as much a storyteller of landscape as he is of people and brokenness. All of his previous works have been based in the southeastern United States – Georgia, northern Florida and South Carolina, a familiar landscape for Martin. With The Mountain Between Us (published in 2010), while part of the story is based in the Jacksonville area, Martin sets most of his story in the Utah wilderness.

It’s a riveting story of survival, stripping away all the facades constructed by two people who come to depend upon each other for their very lives.

Ben is married to Rachel, with two children. Ashley is engaged to marry with two days time. They will spend the next four weeks together fighting snow, fending off mountain lions, trying to find food and shelter and somehow find civilization. And tend to their injuries.

Along the way Ashley will learn that Ben is separated from his wife, and Ben will learn that Ashley isn’t entirely convinced she should be marrying Vince. Yet each remains faithful, even as they are forced into a personal proximity to each other that most married couples don’t have. And Ashley begins to sense that Ben is carrying some deep personal pain that he won’t let go of.

Martin’s usual attention to detail – a trademark of his writing – is fully employed here, so much so that the reader is walking and crawling with them, hunting rabbits and moose, desperately trying to stay alive. It’s an unforgiving landscape, it’s winter, and the cold is felt on every page.

It’s a captivating story, written with the skill I’ve come to expect from Charles Martin.