The other day, I sadly came to the end of No More Giants, a novel originally published in 1966. It’s one of Boiler House Press Recovered Books publications, a series that brings back into print overlooked novels that shouldn’t be overlooked. We so quickly and easily move ahead, casting aside the old for the new, when the old is all that we need. This is the third book I’ve read in the Recovered Books series, and with each, once I started, all I wanted was to keep reading.
The novel takes place on an isolated cattle ranch in Nevada during the 1940s. It’s a setting familiar to author Joaquina Ballard Howles, who grew up on ranches in southeastern Oregon and northwestern Nevada. The love of the wind-swept land and the animals both domestic and wild, let alone the uncomplicated descriptions of the mountains and desert, give the sense Howles is writing from experience. Author Judy Blunt says in the introduction:
…this is a story of the American West that carries in its rich images and quiet voice the truths of a real place and time.
The narrator of No More Giants is a woman looking back at a critical time in her life for which she seeks answers, specifically the key to her brother Brian’s death. Jenny is 15 years old and “achingly not a boy,” which would’ve allowed her to work on the ranch with her father. It’s summer, haying season, and she has nothing to keep her busy. She accompanies and observes the ranch work, and she wanders the land. In the opening, Jenny’s running through a wide alfalfa field where she finds the family’s roan milch cow lying dead on her side. As for 12-year-old Brian, he wants to work on cars more than follow in his father’s footsteps.
Dramatic events include a picnic where Brian almost drowns in a nearby river and a wildfire in a distant canyon that destroys a neighboring ranch. These and other events vividly evoke life in a place where there’s hard work, not much community, and exposure to nature’s unforgiving surprises. Jenny and Brian’s parents bicker hatefully, their mother resentful of the ranch life she thinks is beneath her. Basque immigrants arrive to help with the summer’s long hours of work. One of them, a handsome boy named Justo, is the answer to Jenny’s dreamed of love, and her need for recognition and affection, but he’s more Don Juan than Prince Charming.
Jenny has no framework for what her life can be or should be. Her mother ignores her, while she fawns over Brian, and the price of that is huge. We follow Jenny through the parental fights, shared secrets with her brother, kind attentions of her Aunt Lila, who lives with them, and the steady presence of the family ranchhand, Old Tim. Jenny’s father runs the cattle ranch efficiently with economic success. He’s stalwart, energetic, and hopeful, fueled by the joy of his work. But his wife constantly spews the negative and then one day, not surprising, leaves.
No More Giants became for me one of those books you look forward to when the day begins. I’m not sure I can explain why. No words accurately can describe that contented feeling of being immersed inside an imagined world that leaves this one behind.
Afterword
Judy Blunt, who writes the introduction, is the author of the memoir Breaking Clean, about growing up on an isolated Montana ranch. The New Yorker says this about her book: “Unflinching. . . . A sense of mourning underlies [Blunt’s] account, and she honors the land that she still loves by making us intimate with its smallest details.”
The Neglected Books Page written by Brad Bigelow brings back into the light books that have been, in his words, neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste. It’s a goldmine of treasures, and he editorially collaborates with Boiler House Press on their Recovered Books series. Due to Brad’s efforts, I’ve read many good books and authors I wouldn’t otherwise have discovered. You can read his essay about No More Giants on his website.
The Longest Chapter 