Beartooth

In 2020, Callan Wink gave us August, a moving coming-of-age work that showcased Wink's promise as a novelist. In Beartooth, he follows up with a darkly rich story of two brothers, Thad and Hazen, and their attempts to grind out a liveable existence in rural Montana.

Reading Beartooth was a lot like spending time in Montana and the adjacent parts of Idaho and Wyoming. Like a mountaintop vista on the Continental Divide, its prose regularly skews poetic, and invites the reader to sit in a sense of wonder. Like a brutal cold winter in Island Park or Ennis or Hoback, it is harsh in its portrayal of nature's realities. And in the same way that a traveler can have a warts-and-all appreciation of a small Montana town, this reader could not help but come away with admiration for Beartooth.

While not a perfect work, Beartooth is a step forward for Wink's literary craftsmanship. The delivery of dialogue is improved from his debut, and the interstitial monologue provided by Sacagawea was an audacious, McCarthyesque stroke. There's a Dickensian touch here, too: our impoverished, downtrodden protagonists on the margins of a world which seems to have passed by men like them, and poses the question of whether it needs or even wants them at all.

I enjoyed reading Beartooth so much that I inhaled it like a child who can't help but eat all their Halloween candy in one sitting and has none left over, while all their friends and siblings are snacking for weeks. I'm certain I'll read it again, and soon.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced e-copy for review.

4.5/5 stars