From Publishers Weekly
An old rancher reluctantly takes in his daughter-in-law and granddaughter in this moving and well-crafted, if rather derivative, second novel by Spragg (The Fruit of Stone). Jean Gilkyson hasn't been back to her hometown of Ishawooa, Wyo., since her husband, Griffin, died in a car accident. Jean was driving, and Griffin's father, Einar, has never forgiven her for his son's death. Ten years and four boyfriends later, Jean has run out of money and options. With her precocious nine-year-old daughter, Griff, she escapes boyfriend number four, a smirking brute named Roy. Einar isn't happy to see mother or daughter, but Griff loves his log house and ranch life. She makes friends right away with Mitch, Einar's old Vietnam War buddy, who's been mauled by a grizzly and is horribly scarred, and gradually wins over her grandfather. Meanwhile, Jean is charming the town sheriff, which comes in handy when Roy tracks her down. Spragg's spare storytelling is rock solid, but he covers well-worn territory in language familiar to readers of Cormac McCarthy and Kent Haruf, never quite striking off on his own. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
An Unfinished Life follows on the heels of Spragg’s memoir about growing up on a Wyoming ranch, Where Rivers Change Direction, and his Western debut, The Fruits of Stone. This latest effort, which raises comparisons to Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Eventide (*** July/Aug 2004), delves into the world of fractured families. Memorable secondary characters contribute a great deal of spirit to this emotionally charged story of love, loss, betrayal, and reconciliation. Although most critics adored An Unfinished Life for its concise language, fast-paced plotting, and Western feel, a few criticized its predictable romance and untidy ending. And, most mourned its Hollywood qualities—yes, it will soon hit the big screen, with Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman, and Jennifer Lopez. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From AudioFile
For prodigal daughter Jean Gilkyson, home is the tiny hamlet of Ishawooa, Wyoming, where her estranged father-in-law stubbornly blames her for the accidental death of his son. Jean's 10-year old daughter, Griff, has never known she has a grandfather, until abusive boyfriend Roy bashes in the side of Jean's face and puts mother and daughter on the road home. The two narrators, Tony Amendola and Judith Marx, alternate chapters to reflect the novel's shifting points of view; what could have been a distraction instead adds layers of nuance as the two hard-worn protagonists are illuminated. This bold choice elevates the story beyond the ordinary. Marx astutely conveys Jean's evolving love of the ranch, the land, and the old man who stewards them. Both Amendola and Marx do justice to the taut final showdown, heightening the listener's response. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Spragg completes a sparkling hat trick with his second novel, following his equally fine debut, The Fruit of Stone (a Booklist Top 10 First Novel in 2002), and his much-acclaimed memoir Where Rivers Change Direction (1999). Returning again to his home turf, the high-country horse ranches of Wyoming, Spragg tells a riveting tale of hard-won friendship, old wounds and fresh pain, and love lost and found. Attempting to escape the latest in a long string of abusive boyfriends, Jean Gilkerson, traveling with her nine-year-old daughter, Grif, is on the run with no place to go. No place, that is, except Wyoming, home of her former father-in-law, Einar, who holds her responsible for the accidental death of his son. Alternating from the points of view of Einar, Jean, Grif, and Einar's war buddy and best friend, Mitch, Spragg charts the bone-against-bone meeting of a rugged-individualist rancher and his equally headstrong daughter-in-law, but he shows how Grif and Mitch, each with burdens of their own, manage to temper the conflict with humanity, forcing the combatants to reveal their own vulnerability and face their demons. Generations come of age, each in its own way, as tenderness survives stubbornness, pain, and silence. Each word counts for more than it says in this achingly beautiful story of courage and endurance. Spragg belongs in the same category with such tough-and-tender western writers as William Kittredge, Ivan Doig, and Larry Watson. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Reviews of Mark Spragg's An Unfinished Life

"Mark Spragg invents characters that are as richly drawn and lovingly rendered as the landscape in which he sets them down. An Unfinished Life is honest, engaged, deeply satisfying, and full of an uncanny grace that resides both in the beauty of the language and in these valuable lives." --Pam Houston

"Wyoming, its winds and distances, never quits. What a pleasure it is to watch a few of its hard-forged citizens stay with the task of forgiving, cherishing and caring for one another. Mark Spragg has got the territory dead right in this moving testimony to seeing things through."--William Kittredge

"Mark Spragg's An Unfinished Life is a tremendously accomplished, elegantly written and paced tale of love and loss, the bonds of grief and blood, and the complex turnings of the human heart. This is a heartbreaking yet uplifting novel that is most deeply satisfying. These characters, these people, will remain with me a long, long time."--Jeffrey Lent

“I can’t get more than a few pages into a novel unless the prose is good. In Mark Spragg’s An Unfinished Life the writing is of considerable grace and beauty, plus there’s a compelling tale of the New West which at times is an uncomfortable page turner where you are standing on the sidelines rooting for your heartbreaking favorites.”--Jim Harrison

"Masterly . . . Highly recommended."--Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal, starred review


From the Inside Flap
“One of the truest and most original new voices in American letters,” as Kent Haruf has written, Mark Spragg now tells the story of a complex, prodigal homecoming.

Jean Gilkyson is floundering in a trailer house in Iowa with yet another brutal boyfriend when she realizes this kind of life has got to stop, especially for the sake of her daughter, Griff. But the only place they can run to is Ishawooa, Wyoming, where Jean’s loved ones are dead and her father-in-law, the only person who could take them in, wishes that she was too. For a decade, Einar Gilkyson has blamed her for the accident that took his son’s life, and he has chosen to go on living himself largely because his oldest friend couldn’t otherwise survive. They’ve been bound together like brothers since the Korean War and now face old age on a faltering ranch, their intimacy even more acute after Mitch was horribly crippled while Einar helplessly watched.

Of course, ten-year-old Griff knows none of this–only that her father is dead and her mother has bad taste in men. But once she encounters this grandfather she’d never heard about, and the black cowboy confined to the bunkhouse, with irrepressible courage and great spunk she attempts to turn grievous loss, wrath, and recrimination–to which she’s naturally the most vulnerable–toward reconciliation and love.

Immediately compelling and constantly surprising, rich in character, landscape, and compassion, An Unfinished Life shows a novelist of extraordinary talents in the fullness of his powers.


About the Author
Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, and The Fruit of Stone, a novel. Both were top-ten Book Sense selections and have been translated into seven languages. He lives in Cody, Wyoming.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The sapwood snaps and shifts in the low-bellied stove, and the heat swells up against the roofboards and weathered fir planking, and the whole small building seems to groan.

It's the first cool night of the fall-a good night for a sweat-and Einar adjusts his wet back and ass in the webbing of the lawn chair. He feels the full weight of his seventy years and wishes he'd thought to bring a towel to drape over the webbing, but he was in here just this spring and hadn't remembered one then either. He scoops a dipper of water from the pail beside the chair and casts it across the stovetop where it sizzles and steams.

He wishes he'd have known this was the way it was going to be.

"Some old son of a bitch should've explained getting old to me," he says aloud and then bows his head against the wet pulse of heat. "Some old son of a bitch probably did and I wasn't listening."

The sweat drips from his nose and chin.

He reaches his denim shirt from where he hung it on a nail, soaks it in the bucket and then stands to wring it and mop his face and chest.

He spreads the shirt over the chair and sits back down, staring at the chair that stands empty before him, both chairs raised up on this platform into the heat.

Through the west window he watches the amber moonlight on the pasture and remembers the fall they skidded in the fieldstones and mortared them into the foundation under this board floor. The building was Griffin's idea. He'd said: "Dad, I need it. I really do."
"You need a sauna?" Einar had asked.
"I'm a Viking," the boy said. "It's what the Vikings did."

All of this twenty years ago, Mitch helping them frame the walls and the headers for the door and windows, and Griffin just a boy, but already used to working with the diligence of a man. And not a boy who'd ever asked for much.

They put in a south-facing window, this one to the west, and a square of double-pane glass in the slanting roof so they could see the stars. And a smaller pane low in the east wall for the benefit of the boy's dog, so Karl could lie on the porch and stare in at them.

When they were finished, Griffin took each man by a hand, standing between them, and bowed his head. "God bless this place," he said. He was serious, original, not just repeating something he'd heard.

"Is there anything else you need?" Mitch had asked.

The boy shaded his eyes, looking up at the man. "You could sit in here with us." Mitch's face shone even blacker in the sun, like wet obsidian. "Even though I'm no Viking?" He bent down over the boy. "Even though my great-granddad was an African man?"
"Does that mean no?" Griffin asked.

Mitch shoved him away playfully, the way men roughhouse with boys. "I guess I won't," he said. "I believe I've sweated enough in this life already."

Einar smiles at the clarity of the memory. He works his jaw, and his ears pop as if he were descending from a great height. The old dog fidgets on the porch, then settles its grayed jowls on its crossed forepaws and stares in through the little window. His name's Karl, but it's not the original Karl, just another dog taken from the town shelter, worked and fed and given a place to rest and grow lame. The first Karl lies buried behind the barn. Dead and buried like his son, Griffin, and his wife, Ella.

He straightens in the chair and wonders if the dog wishes it had a boy for company. Not his boy, just some other kid. He wonders what it is that dogs long for, or if they long. Maybe they just wait patiently for some improvement in their lives. He thinks he's a man who knows something of waiting, but the heat's gotten to him and he feels his stomach come up and shorten his breath. He cracks a window and sucks at the draft of night air. He drops his head back and stares through the window in the roof.

Pegasus has risen in the dark sky, poised as if for a run of magic, or that's what he used to think. Now he looks at the stars and sees only a silent, uncaring witness, and tonight feels this press of steam-thick heat, smells the odor of living wood reduced to ash. No magic.

He pops a wooden match with his thumbnail and lights a candle on the shelf by his elbow. He shakes the match out and looks down at his shriveled thighs and worn knees. His legs are white as summer cloud, blue-veined. At least his arms and shoulders are still strong, and he tightens his chest, the muscles in his neck. To the empty chair he says, "I've always been puny through the hindquarters, from the get-go. That's not news."

He scoots forward on the chair and takes the quart Mason jar from the shelf, holds it below him and pisses it half full before setting it down by the water bucket. He thumbs the sweat from his eyebrows and blinks at the walls and shelves, at the fist-size chunks of agate and quartz, the petrified wood and half a dozen of the boy's favorite books. There're the hawk feathers he'd hung on the walls. The skull of a black baldy bull. A map of Norway cut out of a National Geographic, carefully, with a razor blade. One of Iceland. The picture of a bearded man in a horned helmet, and another of a tall black man with a spear, balanced on a single leg. Both from National Geographic, the Norseman and the Senegalese hunter. The boy saw himself as dangerous, raised as he was by the descendants of warriors.

Einar stares down at the dog again and thinks it would be a fine thing to have that kind of focus. To have a small window, with something to stare at on the other side. He wishes for his own window and wonders what he might see. He wonders if Mitch has gone to sleep for the night.

He pushes out of his chair and opens the door. He carries the jar at his side and steps to the edge of the porchboards and sloshes the piss out into the darkness. He stands steaming in the cool air. The dog shifts but doesn't rise, its hips so brittle with arthritis that it moves only when it must. Einar turns back to the doorway and says, "Just like old times."

The dog blinks its clouded eyes and yawns, and Einar thinks this is an animal that should be called out into the tall weeds and shot in the head and buried next to its namesake. But he knows Mitch would never stand for it. Mitch believes in suffering as a right, a burden, even sacred, for both man and beast.

Two

She sits on the side of her bed and reaches back to run the flat of her hand over the sheet. She'd slept on her back, legs straight, arms at her sides. She can feel where the fabric's cool and where it's warm, just there, where her fingertips edge into the outline her sleeping body has made. She imagines the warmth whispering softly that she was here, but in a minute or two there'll be no proof she was ever in this bed, or even this trailer house, like she's invisible. She likes thinking that she can't be seen. It makes her smile.

She listens. There's the noise of her mother in the kitchen, the gurgle of the coffeemaker, water running at the sink. She stands and smooths the wrinkles on the bottom sheet, pulls up the top sheet and cotton blanket and tucks them tight, then fluffs the pillow at the head of the bed, her small hands working in the dim light. She climbs onto the bed and edges a fingernail under the heads of the thumbtacks pressed into the wallboard above the window. The tacks hold the brown bath towel she puts up every evening for a curtain, and they've worn divots in the wallboard, and little particles always fall out when she removes them, like sawdust, but she doesn't think the wallboards are made of wood. She doesn't fool herself about much. She knows everything in this trailer's fake, that it just tricks you into thinking it's real.

The window faces west, and she started putting the towel up in the summer so the setting sun wouldn't overheat her bed. But now it's the end of September, and she's grown used to sleeping in the darkened room. She folds the towel and places it on her pillow. Outside, a tractor is pulling a machine along the edge of a field, the cornstalks falling as it passes. She thinks she might ask Roy what this machine is called, not today, but sometime later. Roy puts guardrails up along the county roads, and since he needs machines to do that she thinks he might know what this one is called.

On the north side of the cornfield there's the interstate, with the cars and big trucks heading east and west filled with people who know nothing about her. She wonders if anyone ever looks her way, or imagines what it's like to live here. If they even notice the three crooked rows of old trailer houses, whose trees aren't big enough yet to climb or to shade the flat metal roofs. The dog next door barks, and she remembers it's Thursday and the garbage truck has turned in off the lane. She's never heard the neighbor dog's name.

She kneels by the bed and pulls out her suitcase and lifts it up on the blanket. Its clasp is rusted, its corners scuffed and peeling.

The first Thursday morning she saw the garbage truck she thought it looked a lot safer than the trailer houses, and all summer she prayed that if a tornado came it would be on a Thursday morning when she could hide in the garbage truck. Then the tornado could crumple this fakey trailer and suck Roy right up from the broken trailer parts and put him down somewhere else. She knows there's no use in killing the man who lives in the trailer. Dead or alive, her mother would just replace him. Before Roy in this trailer in Iowa there was Hank in the trailer in Florida, and before Hank there was Johnny in the little house that smelled like cat pee, and before Johnny there was Bobby. She can't remember Bobby very well, but there've been four. Everybody's mother is good at something. Her mother's good at finding the same man, no matter where she lives.

Her mother tells her that children are a calendar. She says it at least once a month, like it's some new idea she thought up all by herself. Her mother says that if she, Griff Evans Gilkyson, had never been born, never learned to walk, dress herself and speak, then she herself could still think she was a young woman. Griff thinks her very own calendar is her mother's men. Four men. About a year and a half for each one, and before that she was too little to keep track. She shrugs and whispers, "So, I'm nine and a half."

She strips off the T-shirt she slept in and folds it and lays it in the bottom of the suitcase. The suitcase smelled of mothballs and mildew when her mother bought it at the John 3:16 thrift shop, and it still does. She opens her hands flat and presses down against her chest. No titties, she thinks. She's still safe. She thinks that one morning she'll wake up with breasts, maybe the start of hair between her legs, and everything will begin to go wrong. Just like things have gone wrong for her mother. Breasts attract trailer houses and pickup trucks and lots and lots of tears. She wishes her father were still alive. If he weren't dead it would be safe to let her titties grow.

She puts on a pair of tan corduroy pants, a ribbed cotton chemise and a striped polo shirt. She laces her tennis shoes and opens the bottom drawer of her dresser. The dresser and the desk are made of the same pressed particleboard, and she likes them because they don't even try to look like wood. The drawers stick, so she has to be careful to keep them quiet.

She empties all the dresser drawers into the suitcase, every piece of clothing she owns. When she gets a bigger suitcase she'll get more clothes. No sense in owning something she'd need to leave behind. That wouldn't make any sense at all.

She slips her schoolbooks and notebooks into a small backpack. The backpack is orange, with zippered pockets on its sides for her pencils, pens and Magic Markers. Roy bought it for her. He told her orange was a good color for Iowa. "You'll be easy to spot whether there's snow or not," he'd said. "Some hunter won't think you're just a little brown rabbit and shoot you for dinner." She hates the backpack. She prays the tornado will get that too.

She kneels beside her bed and slips her hand between the mattress and box spring. When she feels the coolness of her diary she stops and listens. There's still just the sounds her mother's making in the kitchen, so she slides it out. The cover is lavender patent leather, so shiny she can see her reflection in it. She sits at her desk and opens the diary to its last page: THINGS I HATE ABOUT MY MOTHER.

1. I hate that she's pretty.
2. I hate that she thinks she's not pretty.
3. I hate that she works at the dry cleaners. (But I like Kitty, her boss.)
4. I hate that she doesn't know karate.
5. I hate that she likes the same music Roy likes.
6. I hate that she doesn't believe in God or angels.
7. I HATE that she makes us live in Iowa.

And this morning she adds:

8. I hate it that she's not really, really hairy. So hairy that only kangaroos would fall in love with her.

She's always especially liked that kangaroos travel with their own little pouches, like luggage.

She closes the diary and puts it in her suitcase and cracks her door open, then steps into the hallway and holds her breath. She listens. Her mother shuts off the water in the kitchen. Her mother and Roy's bedroom is at the end of the hallway and the door's closed. The bathroom is the next room toward the kitchen.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Jean Gilkyson is floundering in a trailer house in Iowa with yet another brutal boyfriend when she realizes this kind of life has got to stop, especially for the sake of her daughter, Griff. But the only place they can run to is Ishawooa, Wyoming, where Jean's loved ones are dead and her father-in-law, the only person who could take them in, wishes that she was too. For a decade, Einar Gilkyson has blamed her for the accident that took his son's life, and he has chosen to go on living himself largely because his oldest friend couldn't otherwise survive. They've been bound together like brothers since the Korean War and now face old age on a faltering ranch, their intimacy even more acute after Mitch was horribly crippled while Einar helplessly watched." Of course, ten-year-old Griff knows none of this - only that her father is dead and her mother has bad taste in men. But once she encounters this grandfather she'd never heard about, and the black cowboy confined to the bunkhouse, with irrepressible courage and great spunk she attempts to turn grievous loss, wrath, and recrimination - to which she's naturally the most vulnerable - toward reconciliation and love.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jackie Pray - USA Today

An Unfinished Life has dysfunction and menace and clipped, big-sky dialogue that's as spare as Cormac McCarthy's work but with a warmer patina. The carefully paced story hides surprising flashes of humor inside telling detail.

Publishers Weekly

A sober reading by Amendola and Marx fits the slow pacing of Spragg's newest offering (following The Fruit of Stone), which uses spare, beautiful language to tell a tale of hardship, resentment and reconciliation in smalltown Wyoming. Both veteran narrators give strong performances, though Amendola does a better job than Marx in personifying the book's more idiosyncratic characters-such as the crippled cowboy, Mitch, or the spunky, nine-year-old Griff Gilkyson. A few aspects of the production seem out of sync, however. For one, the ominous music that introduces and concludes each disc is too heavy for the subject matter. It conveys a sense of impeding doom that would be more appropriate in a thriller or even a tale of imminent tragedy, rather than this ultimately hopeful story of tried but tender human relationships. The decision to use two readers also seems unnecessary, as the unpredictable shifts between narrators at chapter breaks shake the listener out of the story. Overall, the recording would have benefited from a simpler approach, but it still offers a stirring look at the importance of individual conflicts and emotions. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Aug. 9). (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"An unfinished life" adorns the gravestone of Griffin Gilkyson (1972-93). We never meet Griffin, but his life-or, to be more accurate, his death-infuses every page of Spragg's masterly second novel (after The Fruit of Stone). If Griffin had not died, his wife, Jean, wouldn't be jumping from man to man to man and finally running away from No. 4. With nowhere else to go, Jean and her nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Griff, make their way to Ishawooa, WY, home of her father-in-law, Einar. If Griffin were alive, maybe Einar wouldn't hate Jean and maybe his best friend, Mitch, wouldn't have been mauled by a grizzly bear. (Now Einar must inject Mitch each morning with morphine.) And if Griffin were alive, Griff would have known she had a grandfather. Spragg draws wonderful portraits, particularly of the old men and of this strong, young girl who doesn't want to make too much noise and anger the adults. Griff becomes the salve, the linchpin that secures her mother and grandfather to a place of acceptance and in so doing discovers her own place in the world. A film from Miramax is scheduled for December. Highly recommended for general fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/04.]-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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