Oh my goodness, what do I say about Idaho by Emily Ruskovich? Some books are both novels and poems. I flip through the book that’s cover makes it look like a nature guide, and whose title made me take a step back and say, really, a book named Idaho—and read a random sentence or two: “One day in August, the whole family got into the truck. Wade at the steering wheel, where Ann is sitting now, Jenny next to him, their daughters, June and May, nine and six, crammed in the back with a jug of lemonade and Styrofoam cups, which they carved pictures into with their fingernails.” These sentences are on page five and they are all the things that make up a good story character and scenery and voice, and (as is revealed later in the novel) plot. And the language is, well, gorgeous.
I am not a poet, and I do not know how to describe why the language is gorgeous, but it is not like most books, which have moments of this coming together of sound and image and meaning. In this book, each sentence is elegant and lovely even when it is describing something horrible like Alzheimer’s or guilt or Styrofoam. In this book, “Meaning is like music; it catches and is carried. It returns.”
Here is another, and seriously, I just opened to any page, landing on168. “The chins always glow yellow. That’s the trick: There’s always a secret. Everyone has something she doesn’t want told.”
Now granted, I’ve read the whole novel, so I am aware of how each of these sentences holds the whole story. And I mean in both passages I included here. It is remarkable.
Idaho is a book about memory and young siblings and marriage and second marriages and murder and home and so many forms of loss. It is a book that would seem to be about too many things, except that the language and the structure make it hold. It is less about Idaho than it is about the places and the people that—in a pinch—we fashion into home.
Laura Stavoe