BUILDING LIVES IN MONTANA

By John Skow

Montana novelist Ivan Doig sets himself a challenge in his big, roistering new novel, Bucking the Sun (Simon & Schuster; 412 pages; $23). His subject--not just the book's setting but also the presence that rules its composition--is a monstrous, chancy construction project in the mid-1930s, the huge Fort Peck dam across the Missouri River in Montana bottomland.

To save his novel from the curse of what used to be called socialist realism, Doig must come up with characters large enough to symbolize the unruly river and the vast dam in combat as construction proceeds, but sufficiently strong and gritty in their own right so that they can't be yawned away as costumed actors posing in front of a diorama.

He finds effective protagonists in the Duff clan, Scottish immigrants and hardscrabble farmers losing their battle with drought and grasshoppers in the river valley until the dam project lurches into motion. Owen, the bookish eldest son, is an engineer. His twin brothers Neil, a truck driver, and Bruce, a diver, work in the river's murk. Father Hugh is a reluctant laborer and enthusiastic boozer, and Uncle Darius, a union organizer on the run. The younger men marry and risk lives and livers as they watch the river slowly pool up behind the growing dam.

The reader is pulled into their story by a puzzle the author has set: What two Duffs--man and woman, naked, married but not to each other--are extracted drowned from a submerged truck as the construction winds down? This is skillful manipulation, the novelist as conjurer ensuring that the reader's first thought is of human beings, not power shovels and spillways. The device works beautifully, and so does Doig's roguish novel. Though not well enough--perhaps never that well, if your characters wear jeans--for its author to escape the tag "regional."

--By John Skow