The Lives of Edie Pritchard

May 4, 2020
Set mostly in eastern Montana, Watson’s vibrant character study (after As Good as Gone) reads like a trio of scintillating novellas, each set 20 years apart. In the late 1960s, young bank teller Edie Linderman is married to Dean, a domineering sporting goods clerk. Their wobbly marriage is beset with maybes and ifs. Maybe she should have married Dean’s more ambitious twin brother, Roy, a flirtatious furniture salesman. If she hadn’t gone with Roy to buy a pick-up, maybe he wouldn’t have had the crippling accident, the murky circumstances of which ignited Dean’s jealousy, and maybe she wouldn’t have left town with a one-way bus ticket west and married smarmy insurance agent Gary Dunn, as she does in the second part of the novel, set in 1987. Edie and Dean have a daughter who, by 18, wearies of her dull life. Edie leaves Gary, hoping to develop a better relationship with her rebellious teenager. In 2007, now 64, Edie relies on her life experiences to rescue her self-absorbed adolescent granddaughter who becomes embroiled with yet another set of battling brothers. Like in the best works of Richard Ford and Elizabeth Strout, Watson shows off a keen eye for regional details, a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, and an affinity for sharp characterization. This triptych is richly rewarding. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit.

Starred review from May 1, 2020
A smart, strong Montana woman struggles to define herself over decades as the men in her life try to control her. Watson's novel is set against the rugged landscape of Montana, the perfect backdrop for a story about a woman who spends her life running up against and away from mountains of male ego and desire. Smart and decisive but too often defined by her good looks, Edie appears at three different points in time: As Edie Linderman, a young wife to Dean, a man whose twin brother is drawn to and obsessed by her; as Edie Dunn, caught in a volatile marriage to a jealous second husband and mother to an unhappy teenage daughter; and as Edie Pritchard, a 60-something grandmother still trying to live on her terms but imposed upon by family and the past. As they do to all of us, outside forces buffet Edie's peace of mind and forward momentum. In each segment, she faces conflict: an ugly random encounter with strangers and the inexplicable behavior of men; a tragic premature death; a threatening young man who underestimates who she truly is. Watson is insightful in his depiction of Edie and those who seek to control her, and his descriptions of small-town Montana life, where guns are frequently a menacing presence, reflect how the potential for violence is ever present beneath the surface of things. The novel crackles with tension, especially the second and third acts; Watson is a born storyteller, and it shows on every understated page. But Edie's story also rings with a hardscrabble poetry. "You might be out here alone someday with what you thought would be your life," Watson writes. "And a gust of wind might blow your heart open like a screen door. And slam it just as fast." What truly lies in Edie's heart? That's what she aims to find out. A riveting and tense examination of identity, violence, and female anger.

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Starred review from June 1, 2020
"You might be out here alone someday with what you thought would be your life. And a gust of wind might blow your heart open like a screen door. And slam it just as fast." That's Edie Pritchard speaking, another of Watson's resolute characters burdened by the inevitability of loss and the implacable landscape of eastern Montana, a region that Watson has made his own as emphatically as Faulkner annexed Yoknapatawpha County. What Edie has lost and is desperately trying to find is some sense of herself, a sense not defined by the men in her life or by the memories her friends have of her as the class beauty in the small town of Gladstone. The taut, understated narrative follows Edie from the mid-1960s to 2007, as she abandons two marriages, both to men not wholly without feelings but unable to see Edie as anything but extensions of themselves, and, finally, as she attempts to determine if there really is an Edie Pritchard, free of men's names, to be unearthed within herself. But before that happens, there is a wayward granddaughter who needs rescuing but resists the effort. Watson remains incapable of creating characters who aren't fully formed individuals, as courageous as they are vulnerable, and here he again displays his rare ability to craft strong women and to describe their everyday lives with rare power. Reminiscent of Evan S. Connell's Mrs. Bridge.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)