Sweep Out the Ashes: A Novel by Mary Clearman Blew

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sweep Out the Ashes: A Novel by Mary Clearman Blew Evelyn Funda Mary Clearman Blew, Sweep Out the Ashes: A Novel. Lincoln: Bison Books, 2019. 276 pp. Paper, $19.95; e-book, $19.95. Unearthing history is a consistent thread in Mary Blew's latest novel, Sweep Out the Ashes, in which twenty-eight-year-old western American historian Diana Karnov has come to the northern [End Page 208] Montana town of Versailles to teach at the town's small college. While the job is what brings her there, she is also there to learn about her own personal history, namely to find her father and discover the truth about her mother's disappearance and death shortly after her birth. Set in the historical moment of 1975, the novel also explores the status of women in academia during the period when the Equal Rights Amendment was being debated for ratification in the states. Additionally, as Diana discovers the largely untold stories of Native peoples in the West from her students and Jake Le Tellier, the Métis man who becomes her lover, Blew portrays the shifting historiography of western American studies in the decade before "new western history" approaches fully took hold. Diana's life is full of ironies. For all of her feelings about women's equality and protests when men open doors for her, in the first half of the novel she seems in constant need of rescuing. As if recasting The Virginian's Miss Molly Wood, Blew shows her repeatedly being rescued by Jake when she loses control of her car on a dangerously icy road and on another, subzero night when she nearly freezes to death while walking home because her car won't start. Jake has to instruct her on how to drive on winter roads, how to maintain her car, and even how to dress appropriately for the bitter cold of a Montana winter. For all of her research and teaching talents as a professor, Diana is profoundly nescient, both in such practical terms as well as socially. Her colleague Ramona observes, "Diana, it's like you were never socialized. You might as well have been raised by wolves, except, I suppose, for having table manners and wearing clothes in public" (156). She had been deeply scarred by the belief that her parents had abandoned her and by a childhood with her cold, domineering maiden aunts who insisted, "You must learn to depend only on yourself" (42), even as they ill-equipped her for the task and continued, on into her adulthood, to try to control every aspect of her life. The interesting challenge Blew sets for herself by framing her story within this western mythology of a woman needing rescue is to show that the teacher can learn, and ultimately Diana does learn to succeed within her time (the 1970s), her new environment, her local and college community, and her relationship with Jake. [End Page 209] Western American literature scholars will find much to consider here, as Blew mentions a number of works of western literature and history (including Mourning Dove's Cogewea and Coyote Stories, Joseph Howard's biographical study of Louis Riel and the Métis people titled Strange Empire, and Lucullus McWhorter's Yellow Wolf). Her book is also reminiscent of Margaret Laurence's 1974 novel The Diviners, with its focus on an orphaned woman fighting for her independence and falling in love with a Métis man who is grappling with his own troubled past. I've known and admired Mary Blew for a number of years through the WLA, and I wrote the Western Writers Series biography of her in 2006, so I see a number of parallels to her previous work. For instance, much of both Blew's own fiction and nonfiction focuses on scarred female characters who are not entirely at ease in their own time, community, or their own skins. The memoirs All but the Waltz, Balsamroot, and This Is Not the Ivy League as well as the novel Jackalope Dreams are just a few of her books in which teachers have serious lessons to learn about themselves. Diana Karnov is another of...