Allen Morris Jones

You don't see a lot of good books about or set in Wyoming, or maybe I just haven't found them yet. I can think of a few. There's Mary O'Hara's GREEN GRASS OF WYOMING, companion to her classic MY FRIEND FLICKA. And several years back I read a really excellent self-published novel, TOM WEDDERBURN'S LIFE, by Theodore Judson, a Wyoming school teacher. More recently there was Alyson Hagy's SWNOW, ASHES, which I loved. And now there's this one, LAST YEAR'S RIVER, by Missoula based author, Allen Morris Jones. It was published in 2001, so I'm late in finding it, but I'm so glad I did, because it is a flat-out beautiful piece of writing, which will easily make my top ten list of best books read this year.

Set in 1924, on a ranch near Cody, Wyoming. LYR is the unlikely love story of Henry Mohr, a "Red Indian," as he describes himself, and Virginia Price, a pregnant, unwed, seventeen year-old New York debutante, sent West to hide her disgrace. Several years older and a somewhat shell-shocked WWI veteran, Henry doesn't want to fall in love with Virginia. In fact, after months of a secretive affair, he tries to leave her, retreating to his trap line in the mountains, but he can't stop thinking about her.

"It's not that he's in love with her. It's only her LACK that's driving him mad. The itch of a missing limb ... It's not that he loves her, it's just that he despairs of life without her ... It's not that he loves her, it's just that she could never have loved him. Never. Just look at him."

Tortured too by his time in the trenches of France where he watched his best friend die, Henry often considers the frailty of human life.

"He has learned the broken bone itch that comes from looking in the face of a man as he dies, and the contentment in knowing that most men are unaware of their own deaths. They are simply alive, and then they are not. He has come to live with the knowledge that he could die at any moment. It could be this moment. Or that one. Or this one here."

Such knowledge has even changed the way he feels about hunting and trapping, things he'd done since he was a boy. "He loves hunting, but could do without the killing."

War left Henry damaged, and he knows this, but finds it hard to understand or accept. "Callin somebody crazy in a war? That's like putting em in a boxin ring then callin em a bully."

Yes, this is a book about how war changes people, but, more than anything, LAST YEAR'S RIVER is a love story, with the 'star-crossed' stuff of Romeo and Juliet, and perhaps even more of LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER, with its multiple, lovingly depicted erotic encounters between Henry and Virginia that are inescapably reminiscent of Connie and Mellors, her gamekeeper.

Great characters, a page-turning story of love, cruelty, regret and longing - gorgeous writing. Allen Morris Jones has created something lasting and beautiful in this book. I absolutely loved it. My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (meer)

In his debut novel Last Year’s River, Allen Morris Jones marries the landscape of the West with the landscape of the human heart. The result is fiction that haunts and sustains like a piano chord resonating long after the fingers have lifted from the keyboard. The music of Jones’ words will also linger long after the eye has lifted from the page.

Combining the sparse prose of Cormac McCarthy with the social-penetration plots of Edith Wharton, Jones writes of a star-crossed romance as poignant as that of Shakespeare’s Verona lovers. Last Year’s River is a novel that is at once familiar and bracingly fresh. You may have heard this story before, but Jones confidently plunges forward with every sentence he writes.

Virginia Price is filled with such Whartonian angst and torment that she could very easily have just stepped from the Lovell Mingotts’ parlor, unbuttoning her gloves and shaking the snow off her small, leather lace-up boots. Like The Age of Innocence’s Countess Olenska or Summer’s Charity Royall, Virginia is a woman caught in the post-Victorian swirl of scandal. The year is 1924, Miss Price is 17, and pregnant. Pregnant by means of a rape, no less.

Her mother, horrified at the looming stain to the family’s reputation in New York society, shuttles Virginia off to Wyoming until she has borne (and born) the fruit of her sins. Virginia is joined in exile by her no-less prim Aunt Pauline. The two travel West to a ranch near Cody, in a “hardscrabble, mosquito-bit valley,â€? owned by a rough abusive moonshiner who hopes to make a profit on his land by turning it into a dude ranch. It’s an austere life by comparison to Manhattan society, but Virginia soon finds reason to like Wyoming: her eyes have fallen on Henry Mohr, the half-breed son of the ranch owner, and her heart starts galloping like a thoroughbred.

Henry is the strong silent type. He’s got Gary Cooper written all over him—if, that is, Coop had fought in the trenches of World War I and returned home a shell-shocked ghost of a man. Jones thrusts us into Henry’s harrowing war experience in just one short chapter (most of the chapters in Last Year’s River are tight and economical) early in the novel and we emerge from those paragraphs shaking and flinching.

When Virginia meets Henry, she sees a cautious, taciturn cowboy who seems to be her emotional twin. Both have been betrayed by life, both are seeking a solace they may only find in the vast timbered wilderness. Henry, Jones writes,

has always found his truest satisfactions in work, in the imposition of order on a world that erodes order at every breath; in the inevitable vanishing of time before a new irrigation ditch, fixed fence or gentled horse. He loves the loss of himself in these jobs, and, at the end, waking to find some new bulwark established against the decay of time.

Henry, in fact, is always on the move—always saddling up, always riding off into the horizon, hunting elk or delivering moonshine for his father. As the Jazz Age blares loudly back in Virginia’s New York, Henry can already feel the noose tightening around the neck of the Old West (it’s no coincidence that Jones sets the novel near Cody, home to Buffalo Bill, the showman who, by some accounts, started pulling the curtain on the frontier with his Hollywood-style Wild West Shows). When Henry rides up into the mountains, he might appear to be running from the ghosts of war, but he’s really searching for the ghost of the diminishing West, which is rapidly being eaten away by “the frenzy of possession.â€?

Jones, a former editor of Big Sky Journal, has written an unforgettable book. It creates a sound in your head—it is the music of a lone guitar-picker sitting around a campfire, the strings vibrating beneath his fingers while, just beyond the firelight, a coyote tips its head back and howls with melancholy beauty.… (meer)