Not since Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath has there been a family saga as powerful as Bucking the Sun or a family as compellingly strife-torn as the one at its center. Driven by drought from their Montana farm to "relief work" building the Fort Peck Dam, the Duff family spans the extremes of the times, from the eldest son Owen, who has made his way through college to an engineer's job on the dam to young Bruce, his antithesis, a risk-taker who works as a diver setting pilings into the treacherous river bottom. In between are Neil, the quiet one, and the brothers' iron-willed wives. When a couple of wild cards are introduced, in the form of a Red Uncle from Scotland and the prostitute he takes up with, the plot gets as thick and turbulent as the muddy Missouri. Bucking the Sun is a startling story of mixed fortunes that races from moment to moment, an epic rendering of time and place that reminds us why Ivan Doig is our foremost living storyteller of the American West.
