Watson indelibly portrays the moral dilemma of a family torn between justics and loyalty; by implication, he also illuminates some dark corners of our national history.
Publishers Weekly A quiet, almost meditative reflection on the hopelessly complex issue of doing the right thing.
Booklist A literary page-turner, morally complex and satisfying. Kirkus Review. Discussion Questions 1. How would you characterize Bentrock? In what ways is the setting, both time and place, reflected in the characters?
Do you think his prejudices complicate his role as sheriff? David idolizes many of the adult characters in the novel—for what qualities does he admire Marie, Gloria, Uncle Frank and his parents? How do these affections contradict one another as the story unfolds? Did you form any predictions as to why Marie was reluctant to see Dr. Frank Hayden, and if so, how accurate were they? What, in your opinion, causes this reversal? Do you agree with the assessment that releasing Frank is the practical and expedient option?
Do you agree with the alternate implication, that prosecuting him is morally absolute? The intervening years have endowed him with the sort of hindsight that makes one aware of heady days not always being so halcyon in reality. The result is a literary addition to the ongoing revisionism of the mythic portrait of the West, a portrait which pits tough cowboys who look like John Wayne against bloodthirsty savages in war paint.
What makes Montana stand out from the crowd of revisionist entries in the Western genre is primarily its timeframe. The post-war years of reflection upon the excitement of beating the Nazis would soon become mired in Cold War paranoia, communist witch hunts stirring up needless suspicion and the dawning awareness that many of the German scientists working so hard to destroy America just a few years earlier had traded in their Nazi salutes for high paying jobs and blanket amnesty for war crimes.
This moral ambiguity permeated late s America to such an expansive degree that it required an entirely new genre for filmmakers to place it into proper context.
What Watson produces from this cesspool ends up seeming less like a traditional Western pitting good guys against the bad guys, and more like a film noir in which it is hard to keep track of who is wearing the white hat and who is wearing the black hat. And in , Watson wrote a prequel to Montana named Justice, which chronicles the Hayden family in the decades leading up to the events of Montana Justice also received critical acclaim, with many critics remarking on the universality of the characters and their flaws.
The Question and Answer section for Montana is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.
David compares his uncle and his father? What are the main differences? By Martin Bucco. New York: Twayne Publishers, When Main Street was published in , Alfred Harcourt hoped for respectable sales. What Harcourt got instead was a novel that sold out as soon as it arrived in book stores, a book that pleased readers from small-town housewives to H. But Main Street stubbornly remained in print. Now, with its republication in the Library of America series, new readers will discover Lewis and Main Street.
Bucco is careful to point out literary sources and parallels ranging from Dickens and H. Wells, whose influence has been pointed out before, to less obvious literary colleagues such as T. While this is a helpful technique, it sometimes seems that more order is imposed on the material than inherently exists.
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