The Hard Life
A Country Called Home, Kim Barnes, 2008
Lost River Idaho Bull Trout 
A young doctor in New Haven Connecticut in the wrong profession who only wants to fly fish; his pretty, pregnant wife, born into a wealthy family, whose only thought is to escape home for an adventurous life of her own; a hard scrabble, run down farm somewhere in Idaho bought site unseen by the couple because it is located on a trout stream;, an orphan, passed from family to family in the small Idaho community until he leaves school at age 16 to live in a shack on his own, the orphan is most practical skilled, level headed character here; an aging pharmacist, the orphan’s only friend, who serves the community’s minor medical needs while he turns increasingly to alcohol; these are the characters that populate Barnes’ new novel.
Idaho Trout Fly Fisherman 
Barnes, who lives near and teaches in Moscow Idaho, takes on rural life in the West as her theme. It is a subject she knows well and writes of clearly without rose colored glasses. Life is hard, interspersed with real tragedies and natural disasters but the residents wouldn’t think of living anywhere else. Members of the community value their independence but shear survival requires them to depend on one another in a crisis. If they judge one another they tend to keep those judgments to themselves; after all, they have to live here among one another. Alcoholism, drug dependency, insanity, pentecostal religion are understood and tolerated as they never would be in a larger community.
While Cormac McCarthy takes nostalgia for the past with terrible violence in the present as his themes; Barnes’ West is a more clear and honest, if sometimes brutal, vision of rural Western life; what it is like to live such a hard life; and why people choose to stay. Amid the harsh daily existence are breathtaking glimpses of a natural beauty that seems to root the natives to their spot.
The novel is a vision of rural Idaho life from 1960 through 1976 that rivals Norman Maclean’s 1920’s Montana in A River Runs Through It for its feel of time, place, and people. A real accomplishment.