Bitterroot, by James Lee Burke.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
$25 — 336 pages.

Some books, like some men, are made for hanging. You’d like to put them up in an oak tree in the back yard and watch them twist slowly in the wind, blowing away page by page until there’s nothing left but the weathered binding and a piece of rope. Most of us might agree to waste a little rope on something like Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Short of that kind of hate literature, however, we must each select our own candidates for the limb. A few of my Latin students would doubtless find pleasure in seeing their textbooks strung up.

For me, John Irving’s fiction since The Hotel New Hampshire might deserve a place on the limb. There are times, too, when the unctuous anti-male, anti-father antics of the Berenstein Bears — books which my 6-year-old son adores, incidentally — make me wonder if those books might not also look fine dancing in the breeze.

Other books, like wayward children, disappoint us in a gentler way. We finish them with a sigh, less angered than saddened by the author’s failure to match our expectations. Such a book is James Lee Burke’s Bitterroot.

In Bitterroot Burke brings back Billy Bob Holland, the former Texas Ranger turned trial lawyer, who has come to Montana to help out Doc Voss, a friend in trouble. Doc is fighting a right-wing militia group and a company that is polluting the rivers. In visiting his friend, Billy Bob becomes part of tangled plot involving bikers, psychopathic killers, pedophiles, drunken writers, gun-toting women, and gruff but goodhearted sheriffs. During the story Billy Bob also realizes that he is in love with Temple Carrol, who has appeared in previous books with Billy Bob. He also continues to fight old personal demons, including the fact that he accidentally killed his former partner in the Rangers during a drug raid. After about half of the people who appear in the book are either killed off, imprisoned, or maimed, Billy Bob emerges triumphant, and returns to Texas with Temple and his son Lucas.

James Lee Burke is a man who can make his sentences sing. In terms of style, Burke is undoubtedly one of the best living American writers. He can make landscapes and weather come alive on the page. Here is just a sample of his style taken from a random page:

The next morning was white with fog that boiled off the Blackfoot River and hung wetly in the trees and gathered like damp cotton on the hillsides. I walked down to Lucas’s tent and watched him fix a fire and start cracking eggs and laying out ham strips in the oversized skillet he cooked in.

So what’s my beef with Burke? It is precisely his talent. Having followed him for 10 years now, and having read the novels that he wrote before his present popularity, I have finally figured out that what bothers me about Burke is that his ambitions don’t match his talent. His plots and his characters simply don’t measure up to his talent for writing. Perhaps his talent traps him; perhaps he feels compelled to write dialogue like Hemingway on a bad day and to create plots that would pass the muster of the politically correct police at Harvard. Whatever the case, Burke writes prose like an angel, but his plots and characters usually quickly go to the devil.

Let’s look at some minor — but specific — complaints about Bitterroot. First, there is his use of the word “sir.” Now a lot of Texans may use the word “sir” as in — “I’m not calling you anything, sir” — but everybody in this book is doing so much siring that the characters sound at times like a bunch of rookies in boot camp. Wyatt Dixon, the redneck evildoer of the book — nearly all the evildoers of Burke’s books are skinny rednecks backed by some sort of businessman — even calls a younger hoodlum “sir.” This usage in the book sounds stilted and ultimately makes the characters ridiculous.

Voice is another problem in Burke’s current novel. He tells his story in first person through Billy Bob Holland, but frequently in the story he switches his perspective to third-person, giving us details and emotions that Billy Bob could not possibly know. While allowing for greater freedom in describing his characters, this device damages Billy Bob’s narrative.

Burke’s ability to create his characters is also hurt by the style he has chosen. Doc, one of the main characters of the story, seems nearly invisible to the reader, hidden by layers of macho baloney. The sheriff is a typical gruff, hard-nosed but kindhearted man who bumbles around helping Billy Bob. The evil Wyatt Dixon is a caricature of cruelty, behaving at times so outrageously that the reader has trouble seeing why someone didn’t blow Wyatt out of the water long ago.

That Burke can create credible characters may be seen in the portraits he has drawn here of Amos Rackley, a federal agent, and of Terry Witherspoon, a punk criminal who hangs out with Wyatt Dixon. Rackley changes in the book, going from an unfeeling agent to a man with a conscience. Burke shows us Witherspoon as being torn by conflicting emotions, trying to choose between his life with Dixon and a life in which he becomes his own master.

There are other criticisms of Bitterroot — Burke’s odd take on sin and the Catholic sacrament of confession, Billy Bob’s seemingly interminable vacations, the silly parade of fashionable villains. Because of his fantastic writing, however, I’ll probably keep reading Burke. And like that apprehensive parent, I guess I’ll just keep hoping that his characters will eventually grow up.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville.)

 

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