Musician Josh Ritter of Moscow, Idaho published his second novel almost fifteen weeks ago, on September 7th. The coming-of-age novel of a young boy’s experience during the last days of the lumberjacks looks back on a legacy left by a deceased father and the men, women, lifestyle and woods that offered Weldon Applegate the life he would share as part of the novel titled The Great Glorious Goddamn of it All.
(Josh Ritter wrote The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All, a novel released on Tuesday, September 7th, 2021).
Weldon Applegate narrates his own story as a ninety-nine years-of-age, looking back to a time following the loss of his father in a lumberjacking accident in what I take to be northern Idaho. Applegate was young, without the presence of a mother, as an approximately thirteen-year-old with a team of lumberjacks working a harsh plot of land for logging. The adventures of his ancestors, back multiple generations preceding his father, were fresh in Weldon’s mind when confronting the need to age into manhood on the spot.
(The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All by Josh Ritter was first released fifteen weeks ago tomorrow).
The going was rugged, the lumberjacks with their saloon life was disappearing, and the ability or desire for something else was just not in the story for Weldon. The story Weldon did have included some degree of aid intermixed with a large helping of rivals that, while difficult in the moment, formed the man we heard from more than 80-years later when he was looking back on life. The idea of rivalry, and the depths of where the rivalry took Weldon Applegate, shine through the pages with engaging detail.
(To date, Josh Ritter has published two novels. The first novel, Bright’s Passage, was released on June 28th, 2011).
The detail of description of relationships in helping to form the man that Weldon Applegate was becoming, and had become in old age, demonstrated a tough son of a gun with a bit of a hard-earned ornery streak. I found the exposition of the storytelling engaging. The people inhabiting Weldon’s past and present were salt-of-the-earth types that feel relatable, which helps The Great Glorious Goddamn of it All work. The lyrical nature of the novel’s language works for me. I grant The Great Glorious Goddamn of it All by Josh Ritter 4-stars on a scale of 1-to-5.
Matt Lynn Digital had respectable year reading in 2020. Today we walk down memory lane for the 40 book reviews made in 2020. We’ll refresh your memory of the books we felt were the biggest successes first. Look for repeat efforts in this listing from Vince Flynn, Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway. Charles Dickens and Erik Larson, while having a single book in the 40 this year, have been reviewed here in the past.
(The books Hard Times by Charles Dickens and Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Al Switzler and Ron McMillan earned the top rating of 4.5-stars by Matt Lynn Digital for books reviewed in 2020).
We offered two books rated at 4.5-stars on a scale of one-to-five in 2020. Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Al Switzler and Ron McMillan combined to write Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. The book shares specific skills to improve listening, facilitation, and safe feelings when having productive, meaningful conversations. Charles Dickens offered a satiric “Dark” novel in the form of Hard Times. Hard Times comments on the harsh realities for families with business and governmental policies designed to fight against them.
(The Dale Carnegie book How to Win Friends and Influence People leads a group of seven nonfiction books that earned a rating of 4.25-stars by Matt Lynn Digital in 2020).
(Stephen Markley and Josh Ritter offer a pair of fictional books that earned high marks of 4.25-stars from Matt Lynn Digital of 2020).
Josh Ritter offers one of the two fictional works earning 4.25-stars from Matt Lynn Digital with the bookBright’s Passage. The storytelling approach uniquely and ambitiously increases emotional tension across timelines with a revelation that really works. A similar, growing tension makes the bookOhio: A Novel by Stephen Markley in offering a stunning yet mysterious sense of vengeance and confused understanding.
(Ron Chernow offers a biography of Ulysses S. Grant that earns 4.0-stars by Matt Lynn Digital).
(The Margarat Creighton narrative nonfiction book The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World’s Fair earned 3.75-stars from Matt Lynn Digital).
Share the Matt Lynn Digital blog with your friends if you see value in what we are doing. Before the end of this year, a similar review for entries on movies will also be coming. We feel these reviews provide excellent content that we would like to continue offering.
It was my friend Cobra who suggested I read Bright’s Passage by Idaho native and country musicianJosh Ritter. Unique in structure and thoughtful in terms of provoking thoughts of the true nature of what we were experiencing through one family presented as separate through movements in time, Bright’s Passage is an ambitious first novel that benefits from the experiences of a songwriter become author.
(Considered musical royalty for fans of Americana and the fusion of rock, country and blues, Josh Ritter wrote the book Bright’s Passage, which is the subject of this review).
Central to Bright’s Passage are the World War One experiences of Henry Bright as a soldier in France. Further there’s the abject sadness of Henry’s childhood beside his mother, three cousins, an aunt, an uncle by marriage, and the extreme poverty of all these parties in West Virginia before the war. Finally, the two histories co-mingle with Henry losing his wife in childbirth, and the burning of his childhood home. Losing faith in his skills as a husband, father, and family member when mingled with real trauma and potential Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) manifested through what one must question is relationships with animals and others, potentially in his imagination.
The largely parallel unfolding of the three major story lines are done in small chapters that speak to timelines one at a time. Parts of the backstory are revealed bits at a time, with the larger sense for context gaining emotional impact, depth, and questions about what the nature of what really is happening as we experience them. The passage Henry Bright takes in Bright’s Passage is poignant, potentially criminal, and decidedly sympathetic should the reader have the patience to read the book to its full potential. I rate Bright’s Passage by Josh Ritter at 4.25-stars on a scale of one-to-five.
Matt Lynn Digital 