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| (Deep Vellum/A Strange Object.) |
A few weeks ago, somewhat bored by what I was currently reading, I rummaged through my pile of unread books, and picked up a novel called Lookout, by Christine Byl. It was a signed copy, but I have no idea how I acquired it. I think it might have been in a swag bag handed to me at a literary gala. In other words, by pure chance. The book was published in 2023 by a small, independent Texan press called Deep Vellum, under their A Strange Object imprint. I thought I’d read a few pages and see if it was any good. 273 pages later, I was in tears, moved and entranced by this tale of the loving but precariously dysfunctional Kinzler family living in rural Montana. The book spans the years from 1985 to 2009, mainly focusing on their younger of two daughters, Cody.
The Kinzlers, headed up by the enigmatic Josiah and the compassionate Margaret, have a secret, a fault line, that all the Kinzlers eventually know and elide as it would be too dangerous to discuss openly. Their neighbors on an adjoining plot of land, the Lindsays, learn it as well, but they have their own problems: a deeply troubled younger son, Clint, a chronically ill mother, Iva, and a father, Doyle, who harbors a not-so-secret passion for Margaret. The Kinzlers have dogs and horses and chickens, but not much money, surviving at first on the proceeds of a ramshackle general store Margaret inherits from her parents, and then later on Josiah’s artful woodworking, the distinctive furniture and knickknacks he creates. He runs this woodshop with the help of Freddy, a hired hand who comes to figure prominently in the Kinzlers’ lives.
CentraI to the novel is the Montana landscape, its hills and plains as well as its plants and animals. Byl’s atmospheric descriptions occur regularly: “A woodpecker flashed above and [Cody] tailed it, trying to identify which kind. Hairy was huge and downy was dainty. Pileated was rare but hard to mistake. Flickers, in the same family, like a cousin, with a candle of a name.” When Cody and Josiah go searching for trees to harvest for Josiah’s creations, we learn, “Larch trees like this one, they agreed, were the best, the only conifers to drop their needles in fall, like leaves. In October they lit a hillside golden and in summer the new needles were mossy green.” Bellowing Elk provide sustenance (one of Cody’s favorite foods is elk steak) and beauty, as well as being central figures in the novel’s denouement. Margaret feeds the chickens, and “[t]he friendly birds [approach] her as always in a rushing pile, like kids pushing for a treat, Lady Red walking figure eights around Margaret’s slightly spaced feet.” These birds are contrasted with the ones that had came "from Doyle as older birds, not raised from chicks, and they were always aloof.” (Aloofness—guardedness—is one of the novel’s themes.)
The book’s title refers to Cody’s job fighting wildfires for a few seasons, where she reconnects with a friend from her teens, Jess McCafferty, who used to date her sister. It also refers to the admonition her father gives her to “pay attention” (in fact, it’s the title of a chapter), to observe, to learn. Cody eventually marries Jess, but he knows that she is holding herself back, being too careful: “Still, between us lately it’s like a stick-framed house before the sidings on, a hollow empty space full of angles and air.” When Cody was a girl, she ventured out on horseback once and got lost, spending several frightful hours in the darkened landscape. She attributes her mistake to not following Josiah’s advice, to not paying attention. So throughout her life, she’s been both watchful and fearful, afraid of not being ready, afraid of not being enough, thinking she can keep the ever-threatening fires at bay if she just attends closely enough to all that surrounds her.
Fire is a constant literal and metaphorical threat throughout the saga. The very first line is “The summer of the fires started cool and damp.” Cody and Jess discover their love for each other spending the night in a forest service cabin, and the wildfire they’re battling comes close in a “near miss,” which we’re told is technical firefighting term with a specific meaning. Near misses abound, until danger strikes and Josiah’s end comes about in a fiery crash.
The narrative comes in a jumble of chapters and points of view: short, pithy first-person sections and longer third-person narratives that nevertheless focus on specific characters. The effect suggests a mosaic artist who appears to start with no definite image in mind, but as she places the tiles she discovers it. Byl appears to have worked on the novel, her first, over a significant number of years, adding to it in distinct units until it became a splendid whole. I’m not sure what to make of one of these segments, a few pages from the point of view of the family dog, a jarring departure from the rest of the novel’s naturalism. (I can imagine Byl having a heated fight with her editors over this passage. The dog is our first witness to Josiah’s secret, but surely she could have found a better method of revelation.) The shifting consciousnesses are somewhat reminiscent of the novels of Lee Smith, but where her characters are sharply delineated, Byl’s seem to share a common language, a similar way of looking at things.
Byl’s prose is hypnotic and alluring throughout. She suffuses her story with details, and they can come sneaking up on you, so much so that you might wonder if it’s something the author just thought of and fell in love with so she tucked it in where she happened to be in her writing, injecting a memory right there and then so she didn’t have to go back and insert it in its proper chronology. It’s late in the novel when Margaret reminisces about visiting the Lindsays’: “In winter, they’d visit for an evening dinner carrying a Pyrex dish in a picnic basket covered by a towel. The dogs sprinted ahead and Josiah pulled the kids on a sled.” This is the first we’ve heard of this apparently common occurrence. It’s almost at the novel’s end that Freddy says to Cody, “Your pop would be awfully proud.” Byl then tells us, “He used the name she’d called her father by . . .,” but Byl evokes the passage of time so effectively that I had forgotten Cody ever used that name. But then, the two characters almost never call each other by name, the closeness of their connection never really requiring it. Byl uses this technique, these sudden flashbacks, to keep us off-balance, to surprise us, to let us know that however much we think we know about the Kinzlers, about the Lindsays, about Freddy, about Margaret’s siblings or Josiah’s disastrous parents, we will never know it all. She writes the way memory works, how the oddest, smallest detail about your past can pop in your head at unexpected moments, catching you unawares and wondering why that image and why now.
Cody’s story, her eventual realization of the danger to herself and to those she loves that comes from her reticence, her inclination to observe rather than act, rather than trust, isn’t really new in literature. But Byl’s characters are fully formed and beautifully written. Lookout is about things that are lost and then found, things guarded too closely so that the guarding is the loss, and the letting go is the finding. It’s a gorgeous, heartbreaking, and hopeful novel.
The Kinzlers, headed up by the enigmatic Josiah and the compassionate Margaret, have a secret, a fault line, that all the Kinzlers eventually know and elide as it would be too dangerous to discuss openly. Their neighbors on an adjoining plot of land, the Lindsays, learn it as well, but they have their own problems: a deeply troubled younger son, Clint, a chronically ill mother, Iva, and a father, Doyle, who harbors a not-so-secret passion for Margaret. The Kinzlers have dogs and horses and chickens, but not much money, surviving at first on the proceeds of a ramshackle general store Margaret inherits from her parents, and then later on Josiah’s artful woodworking, the distinctive furniture and knickknacks he creates. He runs this woodshop with the help of Freddy, a hired hand who comes to figure prominently in the Kinzlers’ lives.
CentraI to the novel is the Montana landscape, its hills and plains as well as its plants and animals. Byl’s atmospheric descriptions occur regularly: “A woodpecker flashed above and [Cody] tailed it, trying to identify which kind. Hairy was huge and downy was dainty. Pileated was rare but hard to mistake. Flickers, in the same family, like a cousin, with a candle of a name.” When Cody and Josiah go searching for trees to harvest for Josiah’s creations, we learn, “Larch trees like this one, they agreed, were the best, the only conifers to drop their needles in fall, like leaves. In October they lit a hillside golden and in summer the new needles were mossy green.” Bellowing Elk provide sustenance (one of Cody’s favorite foods is elk steak) and beauty, as well as being central figures in the novel’s denouement. Margaret feeds the chickens, and “[t]he friendly birds [approach] her as always in a rushing pile, like kids pushing for a treat, Lady Red walking figure eights around Margaret’s slightly spaced feet.” These birds are contrasted with the ones that had came "from Doyle as older birds, not raised from chicks, and they were always aloof.” (Aloofness—guardedness—is one of the novel’s themes.)
The book’s title refers to Cody’s job fighting wildfires for a few seasons, where she reconnects with a friend from her teens, Jess McCafferty, who used to date her sister. It also refers to the admonition her father gives her to “pay attention” (in fact, it’s the title of a chapter), to observe, to learn. Cody eventually marries Jess, but he knows that she is holding herself back, being too careful: “Still, between us lately it’s like a stick-framed house before the sidings on, a hollow empty space full of angles and air.” When Cody was a girl, she ventured out on horseback once and got lost, spending several frightful hours in the darkened landscape. She attributes her mistake to not following Josiah’s advice, to not paying attention. So throughout her life, she’s been both watchful and fearful, afraid of not being ready, afraid of not being enough, thinking she can keep the ever-threatening fires at bay if she just attends closely enough to all that surrounds her.
Fire is a constant literal and metaphorical threat throughout the saga. The very first line is “The summer of the fires started cool and damp.” Cody and Jess discover their love for each other spending the night in a forest service cabin, and the wildfire they’re battling comes close in a “near miss,” which we’re told is technical firefighting term with a specific meaning. Near misses abound, until danger strikes and Josiah’s end comes about in a fiery crash.
The narrative comes in a jumble of chapters and points of view: short, pithy first-person sections and longer third-person narratives that nevertheless focus on specific characters. The effect suggests a mosaic artist who appears to start with no definite image in mind, but as she places the tiles she discovers it. Byl appears to have worked on the novel, her first, over a significant number of years, adding to it in distinct units until it became a splendid whole. I’m not sure what to make of one of these segments, a few pages from the point of view of the family dog, a jarring departure from the rest of the novel’s naturalism. (I can imagine Byl having a heated fight with her editors over this passage. The dog is our first witness to Josiah’s secret, but surely she could have found a better method of revelation.) The shifting consciousnesses are somewhat reminiscent of the novels of Lee Smith, but where her characters are sharply delineated, Byl’s seem to share a common language, a similar way of looking at things.
Byl’s prose is hypnotic and alluring throughout. She suffuses her story with details, and they can come sneaking up on you, so much so that you might wonder if it’s something the author just thought of and fell in love with so she tucked it in where she happened to be in her writing, injecting a memory right there and then so she didn’t have to go back and insert it in its proper chronology. It’s late in the novel when Margaret reminisces about visiting the Lindsays’: “In winter, they’d visit for an evening dinner carrying a Pyrex dish in a picnic basket covered by a towel. The dogs sprinted ahead and Josiah pulled the kids on a sled.” This is the first we’ve heard of this apparently common occurrence. It’s almost at the novel’s end that Freddy says to Cody, “Your pop would be awfully proud.” Byl then tells us, “He used the name she’d called her father by . . .,” but Byl evokes the passage of time so effectively that I had forgotten Cody ever used that name. But then, the two characters almost never call each other by name, the closeness of their connection never really requiring it. Byl uses this technique, these sudden flashbacks, to keep us off-balance, to surprise us, to let us know that however much we think we know about the Kinzlers, about the Lindsays, about Freddy, about Margaret’s siblings or Josiah’s disastrous parents, we will never know it all. She writes the way memory works, how the oddest, smallest detail about your past can pop in your head at unexpected moments, catching you unawares and wondering why that image and why now.
Cody’s story, her eventual realization of the danger to herself and to those she loves that comes from her reticence, her inclination to observe rather than act, rather than trust, isn’t really new in literature. But Byl’s characters are fully formed and beautifully written. Lookout is about things that are lost and then found, things guarded too closely so that the guarding is the loss, and the letting go is the finding. It’s a gorgeous, heartbreaking, and hopeful novel.
– Joe Mader has written on film and worked as a theater critic for various publications including the SF Weekly, The San Francisco Examiner, Salon.com, and The Hollywood Reporter. He previously served as the managing director for the San Francisco theater company 42nd Street Moon. He currently works at Cisco Systems and writes on theater for his own blog, Scene 2.
