This is a story about a family in a place that is as old as time, more like the Oregon woods of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion (1964). This is not the whimsical and idealistic relationship that Christopher McCandless had in Alaska, which ultimately killed him, as told by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild (1996). This style of rural gothic literature never shies away from the desperation that the land sows into its inhabitants, just as its inhabitants sow the seeds of life into the same Idaho soil. Ruskovich describes a place full of wonder, though muted by isolation and cold. The language is relentlessly brutal, and like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), consists of elongated passages of sadness punctuated with moments of joy. Idaho, like its namesake, is indeed “beautiful and quiet and secret”. It is beautiful and quiet and secret and can also be very scary. The feeling I get from these characters is the feeling I get from the mountains of Idaho.

I never made an actual decision to set the novel in Idaho Idaho was there from the very beginning, from the very first moment I started to feel my way around this story, and in that way, the story and the setting feel inextricable from each other. But in a February 2017 interview for Medium’s “Electric Lit”, she said the novel came out of the first chapter, which Ruskovich wrote as a story while a graduate student at Iowa. The novel feels like the last two chapters were written first, as if Ruskovich heard the story of how Idaho got its name, and that inspired her. It’s just that Ruskovich has been able to put something complex into words.

Is time the element that binds us all? Can we communicate from the future to the past, and vice versa, through time? Idaho is neither supernatural nor science fiction it’s a whodunit that is not beyond the realm of possibility.

It’s a tribute to memory, and it asks questions that make it feel like the films Arrival (2016) and Interstellar (2014). Told in flashback, the story centers on a couple, Wade and Ann, and the tragedy their marriage is built upon. However, in the words of the rock band Blues Traveler, “the mountains win again”, and so too does the land win in every aspect of Emily Ruskovich’s beautiful novel, Idaho. Place matters, and place creates the geography that makes people foolishly believe it can be tamed. Every aspect of Barack Obama’s post-collegiate life was shaped by Chicago. In the new podcast series, Making Obama, on WBEZ-Chicago, the former president, his staff, and supporters are repeatedly asked if his story could have happened in any other city, and the answer is an emphatic no.

Emily ruskovich