In Calamity's Wake

September 2, 2013
On his deathbed, Miette promises her adoptive father that she will seek out her mother, the notorious western legend Calamity Jane. What follows is a dark and thrilling adventure through the American Badlands in the late 19th century, brought to life by exacting prose and a gallery of gothic characters (including a hag claiming to be Miette’s dead father’s love and a woman who begs Miette to find her children’s bones at the bottom of a well). By turns cinematic in its rendering of landscape and heartbreaking in its rich depiction of its young heroine, poet and novelist Caple (Mackerel Sky) employs a full range of language and experimental narration to innervate the plot. Interspersed through Miette’s story are minor characters’ perspectives and larger-than-life portraits of Calamity Jane—rendered through colloquial tall tales, dime-novel hyperbole, and something close to genuine biography—that lend a fascinating tone to the book and blur the line between the historic woman and the myth she became. As Miette travels the wild country in search of her mother and herself, an early line in the story continually haunts her journey: “One likes to believe in the goodness of people. But the people you meet on the road, well, sometimes the unseen cannot really see themselves.”

September 15, 2013

Categorizing her third novel (after Mackerel Sky and The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World) as "metahistoriographic fiction" and using touches of magical realism and dime novel sensationalism, Caple succeeds in spinning a wild and wooly tale of the American West in the late 1800s. Readers meet Calamity Jane's daughter, Miette, at her adoptive father's deathbed when he implores her to find her mother. Miette has never met her legendary mother and dreads the task. Alternating chapters present Miette's journey and tales from Calamity Jane's life as an army scout, sharpshooter, hard-core drinker, bear killer, and charitable soul. Spirits and ghosts appear, facts are slippery (Buffalo Bill may or may not be Miette's father), and variety in the form of poems, songs and dreams add zest to the literary mix. VERDICT The many sides of Calamity Jane (born Martha Jane Canary) have been presented before by contemporary authors, including Larry McMurtry (Buffalo Girls) and Pete Dexter (Deadwood), but the archetype of the wild woman never dies and receives colorful treatment here. Readers looking for fresh Western fiction will be well satisfied.--Keddy Ann Outlaw, Houston

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2013
Who was Calamity Jane? A liquor-loving wild woman? A dime-novel invention? The daughter she abandoned sets out to discover the truth in an impressionistic portrait of frontier days. Forget Doris Day singing "The Deadwood Stage." Canadian poet and novelist Caple's (Mackerel Sky, 2004, etc.) patchwork depiction of the iconic female scout is darker and less definitive than Hollywood's. Born Martha Canary, perhaps the child of poor farmers, or a madam, or maybe even raised by wolves, the mythic figure of Calamity Jane is surrounded by imprecision. All that young Miette knows is that Calamity Jane was the mother who abandoned her, and now, on the death of the kindly priest who raised her, Miette has obeyed his dying wish and begun a journey to find her. Martha's and Miette's chapters alternate in a dreamy, often melancholic tale of the American West, a place of stupendous beauty and abundance, now in the throes of profound change because of settlement, the Civil War and suppression of the Native American population. Miette's harsh journey, threaded with visions, ghosts and glimpses of violence as well as rumors of her mother's life and location, concludes with an implausible letter and a tender death scene. Calling her novel a work of metahistoriographic fiction, Caple has concocted an atmospheric, sometimes-soaring, but increasingly uneven amalgam of research and lyrical prose. Only fitfully successful.

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September 1, 2013
Honoring the deathbed wish of the priest, her father, who raised her, young Miette goes in search of her mother, Martha Canary, aka Calamity Jane. Across the Badlands she encounters Indians, Negro minstrels, prostitutes, and, in delirium, the mystical presences of a hag and a noble wolf. Into Miette's odyssey, Caple interjects lore about Calamity Jane in the form of poems and songs, as well as narrative, and she emerges as a drunk, a sharpshooter, a great show-woman, and even a sort of Florence Nightingale when she ministers to friends down with smallpox. There are some marvelous scenes: children serving food to a troupe of irregular Unionists, who will shortly destroy the place; or the madwoman who lures the half-starved Miette down a well to look for her long-dead children. Some scenes, such as the account of President McKinley's assassination, don't seem to belong. In Calamity's Wake is beautifully written, reminiscent of Karen Fisher's lyrical A Sudden Country, except for its lack of focus. The novel is likely to appeal to readers of women's fiction or experimental novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)