Review: Brothers take on a dangerous mission in adventure novel ’Beartooth'

On the back cover of “Beartooth,” a blurb from novelist Junot Diaz compares it to “A Simple Plan,” which is both high praise and a very dangerous game to be playing.

“A Simple Plan,” which became a terrific Minnesota-set movie in 1998, was written more than three decades ago but the dread-filled suspense novel is still highly thought-of and frequently read — perhaps, in part, because Scott Smith has only published one other book in the intervening 32 years. Like Harper Lee, he wrote an all-timer out of the gate and hasn’t done much to follow it up.

Like “A Simple Plan,” “Beartooth” is a gripping, rural-set adventure novel in which brothers make a terrible decision that permanently alters their lives and their relationship to each other. They’re Thad and Hazen, whom author Callan Winkwrites, “have faces made for the weather, for looking into it.”

It’s easy to picture those faces, with deep lines etched in them despite their youth. The brothers live on the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park, barely cobbling together a living by chopping and hauling wood, and by growing or catching much of their own food.

Thad has made his peace with their difficult, just-barely-on-the-grid lives. But Hazen, who the book implies has an unspecified intellectual disability (also like one of the brothers in “A Simple Plan”), is susceptible to the smooth talk of unsavory types who sense that his vulnerabilities can be preyed upon. And, with their dad dying and the roof of their home beginning to cave in, the brothers really do need money.

The set piece of “Beartooth,” which is swift, gripping and a lean 241 pages, is what Thad and Hazen do to get that money. An unscrupulous thug hires them to acquire a cache of elk antlers, which they attempt to find and then transport through river rapids in exchange for enough money to make their lives much more comfortable. Hazen, in particular, wants to buy a beat-up truck that seems to represent freedom to him.

Wink, who previously published a novel and a short story collection, is a spare, exacting writer. It’s not until “Beartooth” reaches its raw conclusion that you realize there’s not a word out of place and that virtually all the events in the brothers’ doomed lives seem to have been forecast by the ominous first sentence. It hints that their morality is on a slippery (and mountainous) slope: “Thad had just shot a black bear out of season.”

It’s one of those books in which, as tiny but disastrous decisions accrue, you wish you could reach into the pages and implore Thad and Hazen to wake the heck up. There would be no “Beartooth” if they did, of course, and Wink makes all of their decisions feel unnervingly sensible — especially when someone from their past arrives and reminds them that the world outside their home has both promise and danger.

Politics aren’t discussed in the book. But it’s impossible to read Wink’s words without thinking about why impoverished people might start to think the trappings of society are not for them, why they may think that they operate by a different set of rules and why they could be desperate enough to grab at a fleeting chance for a little bit more than they have.

Even the title of the book hints at that. Beartooth is a mountain and, as the brothers warm their hands with cups of coffee in their freezing shack, it seems to stand between them and another, happier life.

Beartooth

By: Callan Wink.

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau, 241 pages, $27.