The Great Reread, #8: Kingdomtide, by Rye Curtis

Kingdomtide, by Rye Curtis (2020). First read: February 2020.

What I thought then: I absolutely loved it; it was the first entry in 2020’s Books of the Year. I wrote: “Imagine that Olive Kitteredge is a septuagenarian Texan Methodist, then add a survivalist bent worthy of Cormac McCarthy, and you have the outline of Cloris Waldrip, Curtis’s protagonist in this brilliant, heart-bending debut. Cloris is the only survivor of a light plane crash in the mountains of Montana that kills her husband of many decades and the pilot. She must walk out of the hills if she wants to live: no one from the outside world believes there were any survivors, except for tenacious, alcoholic park ranger Debra Lewis. Oh: and Cloris isn’t alone in the mountains. Encompassing theology, sex, grief, and culpability, Kingdomtide asks what we owe to each other, individually and as a community, and challenges the contexts in which we judge one another. It’s also, dryly, quite funny.”

What I thought this time: Well, I loved it this time around too. One of the purposes of this Great Reread project—perhaps the primary purpose—is to see whether things I loved on first reading have held up, and Kingdomtide has.

Cloris Waldrip’s voice continues to be moving, compelling, dryly funny at times. Her relationship with the “masked man” who saves her life more than once in the wilderness becomes a focal point for a strange, almost parental tenderness that grows between them, the masked man caring for her by providing food, shelter, and company, and she caring for him by withholding judgment and asking him perceptive questions. The reader becomes aware much earlier than Cloris does, through the interpolation of the secondary storyline, that the man is wanted by the FBI in connection with the disappearance of a twelve-year-old girl. In his conversation with Cloris where he finally admits to this, he represents that relationship with the twelve-year-old as true love, a claim that is almost certainly not what it seems. Cloris was raised a Texan Methodist, and she is not an idiot, but despite the opportunities for prejudice or even reasonable fear, she steadfastly meets him where he is, holding the contradictions of his behaviour—he has repeatedly saved her life; he may have hurt or even killed a child—together simultaneously. It’s one of the hardest things for a human being to do, I think, to hold a contradiction, and for a fictional character to do it (to be written to do it, I mean) with such self-awareness and clarity is really rare. It’s one of the reasons Cloris is so memorable.

We never get a chance to see much of her before her plane crashes in the Bitterroot wilderness, although there are memories that she describes, revealing her irrational loathing for a fellow Methodist woman, her brief and long-ago extramarital affair with a neighbour, a suicide attempt after discovering she can’t have children, and the quiet, undemonstrative, but deeply rooted love shared between her and her husband. But we do get the sense that Cloris before had fairly conventional attitudes, that her life choices (at least the external, visible ones) largely adhered to whatever her society had to say about women or sex or God. Her experiences in the Bitterroot do not make her a different person—she has obviously had the grit and pragmatism that she demonstrates for her entire life—but they make her, perhaps, more of the person that she is. Her three-month ordeal coincides with a now almost defunt liturgical season in the Protestant church known as Kingdomtide (hence the title), in which charitable actions are emphasised as well as “the message of the kingdom of God”, according to Merriam-Webster. You could argue all your life—people do—over what that message is, but I think it is reasonably uncontroversial to suggest that the message is love. To love someone, amongst other things, is to enable them to be the most of their truest self. In that sense, Cloris and the masked man love each other, and maybe Cloris and the wilderness love each other, too.

That’s not to say the novel has no flaws. I struggled a little more this time with the secondary storyline, which is apparently impossible to discuss critically without reference to Fargo; almost all the reviews do it! But it’s easy to see why: there’s a highly Fargo-esque feeling about the lavishly alcoholic forest ranger Debra Lewis, her bizarre team of rangers and volunteers, the eccentrics and cranks who live in the area near her station (including an Indian woman named Silk Foot Maggie who makes vaguely terrifying sculptures out of animal bones and trash), and the completely bizarre search-and-rescue specialist Steven Bloor, with whom Lewis has an unenthusiastic sexual relationship of frankly horrifying levels of cringe. Lewis is convinced that Cloris is still alive, even after everyone else has given up on her, but their storylines never intersect directly. (There is an indirect connection, which pleased me very greatly when I got to it.) Her storyline contains so many characters teetering on the edge of the grotesque, so many Gothic details (like the men in her station being obsessed with the ghost of Cornelia Åkersson, a trans woman murdered in the area in the 1800s who supposedly haunts the mountains on the back of a glyptodont), that it’s colourful but not very coherent. Similarly dramatic but improbable is the speed and quantity of Lewis’s drinking, which seems to have her downing about six bottles of wine a day whilst also somehow not crashing her car. Now that I come to write about it, maybe that’s the point—perhaps the whole heightened surrealness of life in the ranger station is Curtis’s contribution to the Gothic Southern/Western grotesque/folklore tradition—but it sits a little uneasily with Cloris’s sections, which feel so much more immediate and affecting.

Even so, an immensely worthy reread, still as moving and transcendent as it was on publication. I hope Rye Curtis is working on something else; he’s had three years, it would be so interesting to see where he goes next. In the meantime, this remains a keeper.