One August afternoon on his farm, North Dakota poet laureate and horse farmer Woiwode makes a novice farmer's mistake and almost loses his life in a farm accident. Using this near-death experience as his Proustian madeleine, Woiwode (Beyond the Bedroom Wall
) brilliantly weaves strands of his writing life, his teaching life and his family struggles into a colorful chronicle of his journey from childhood to adulthood. In rich detail, he recalls his early days as a struggling writer in New York and his move to North Dakota in order to discover the mystery of nature and the mystic nature of place and its role in writing. As a young writer, when he read a novel a day, Woiwode remembers waking to the air of a Turgenev hunt, shaving with a razor like a character from Cather and brewing thick black coffee in honor of Colette. Woiwode regales readers with tales of parties with Roger Straus, Robert De Niro, Susan Sontag and John Cheever. At the center of these sparkling recollections of a writer's life, however, lies the relationship of the father to the son, and Woiwode addresses his memoir to his son, Joseph, as a way of coming to terms with his failures to recognize how deeply his own father's identity has become his own. (Mar.)
