★ 06/29/2020
Loskutoff’s superb debut novel (after the collection Come West and See ) sets a revisionist contemporary western in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. Ruthie Fear is abandoned as a toddler by her mother and raised by her father, Rutherford, a man “angry at the rich, the government, and Ruthie’s departed mother in varying order and intensity.” One night, on the outskirts of No-Medicine Canyon, six-year-old Ruthie and her dog, Moses, see a terrifying headless creature. She and her friend Pip then spend years searching for this “wrongness in the woods.” As earthquakes, mudslides, and droughts make Ruthie feel “shadowed by violence,” mill jobs dry up, and developments and mansions are constructed, creating brutal divides among the rich and poor, the whites and Salish natives, and the “arrogant” scientists who work at a local lab and look down on the “uneducated rednecks” who live in trailers and spend their money on machine guns. At 15, Ruthie, still obsessed with the headless creature, attends a protest at the lab, where she imagines evil, unnatural deeds taking place. Loskutoff captures the vast and lonely land along with its beauty with breathtaking descriptions of violence and empathy, and ends with a shocking and poignant surprise. With its humor and heart, Loskutoff’s harrowing tale offers a heroine to root for. This one hits hard. (Sept.)
"On the surface, Ruthie Fear is a coming-of-age story that explores poverty, violence and death. But below that surface lies an examination of the shifting demographics of western Montana, where a largely white, working-class community is being displaced…even as their own world slowly implodes from poverty and climate change—and supernatural forces."
High Country News - Gabino Iglesias
"Like the exemplars of Western fiction Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner, Loskutoff grants his landscape the agency and complexity of a main character."
New York Review of Books - Regina Marler
"A powerful story about the disenfranchised…Loskutoff neither divides his characters into villains and victims nor presents them as objects of condescension or condemnation."
Harvard Review - Donna Henderson
"An original and shape-shifting western parable. A book full of earnest, proud, damaged, and endearing characters, each one chasing their own American Dream. Maxim Loskutoff’s writing is endowed with fearless audacity, stunning grace, and gutsy heart."
"A ferocious, unsettling, raging storm of a novel that captures not only a place of hauntings and heartbreaks but also a world on the precipice. This is a symphony on fire, a call for us to be better—a beautiful, glimmering song."
"Maxim Loskutoff writes the various violences of the contemporary American West (development, extraction, racism, misogyny, and guns, guns, guns) unapologetically, unromantically, and with a razor-sharp clarity that’s like a punch to the gut. The novel not so much centers around as conjures itself out of the fierce, tender wolf cub of a girl at its center who receives, exposes, incorporates, and transmogrifies that violence. I want Ruthie Fear on my side as we descend into whatever comes next."
"A brilliant, gritty, and poetic novel. In Ruthie Fear , Maxim Loskutoff explores the ongoing exploitation and destruction of the natural beauty and wildlife of the American West with one of the most vivid, honest, and heartbreaking characters to appear in fiction in the last few years."
★ 2020-06-17
Neither Loskutoff’s novel nor the character who inspires its title is easy to summarize. To say that this book covers several decades in the life of its protagonist and tracks her shifting bonds with her father and some of the other residents of a rural Montana town would be accurate. That description wouldn’t get at the mysteries that this book contains, nor would it properly encapsulate the memorable contradictions held by Ruthie herself. The early pages introduce Ruthie as a child, raised by her father. At the age of 5, she sees a bizarre creature in a nearby canyon. “A tall feathered thing, it lurched toward the creek on two long, spindly, double-jointed legs.” Even more alarming is the fact that it lacks a head. This intrusion of the uncanny into an otherwise realistic novel is the first indication that Loskutoff is willing to take this narrative into unexpected places. A number of other scenes, though more overtly realistic, offer a similarly dizzying experience. One, in which a high school–aged Ruthie is caught in a violent incident, is harrowing for its suddenness. Omens and dreams punctuate the novel, including a particularly vivid dream involving moss and dead skin. An early reference to “her short life” hints at something terrible to come for Ruthie—but the arc of this novel is anything but predictable. Its conclusion represents a bold and potentially divisive decision on Loskutoff’s part—but ultimately a powerful and evocative one that casts a number of earlier scenes in sharp relief.
With resonant characters and a great sense of place, this novel rarely goes where you’d expect, and is stronger for it.
"Ruthie Fear yanks you into its urgent world, where wildness is an endangered species and wilderness is being fenced off and paved over. Maxim Loskutoff’s debut novel walks a line between the dirt and bone of the earth and the hazy nightmares of myths. Written with love and precision, this book will cling to you long after the last page."
"[A]stonishing ... a magnificent novel."
Bookreporter - Sarah Rachel Egelman
"Maxim Loskutoff takes the real world, the gritty realism of western mountain poverty and class warfare, and turns them inside out, infusing them with the wonderfully strange. The ancient mountain wilderness becomes a violent ecotone between two worlds that cannot coexist, and we see the inevitable catastrophic clash through the eyes of a fascinating new young hero in American fiction."
"Meet Ruthie Fear. Once you know her, you’ll never forget her. Maxim Loskutoff maps Ruthie’s Bitterroot Valley with clarity, wisdom, and tenderness, tracking the shifting relationships between those who originally inhabited the land and those who have colonized it, those who hunt and those who are hunted. This novel will seize you by the throat from its very first pages and leave you gasping for air by its end."
"Loskutoff hones and deepens the unique skill he showcased in his debut…a capacity for human complexity, the talent to hold beauty and ugliness at once."
Ploughshares - Yardenne Greenspan
"Ruthie’s lawlessness makes her an acute observer of contradictions within herself and in the community, and Loskutoff uses tropes of the Western—vivid depictions of mountain landscapes and hunting scenes—to offer a subtle portrayal of poverty and class warfare."
"Loskutoff depicts the casual brutality of Ruthie’s coming-of-age, as well as its wild, precarious wonders. His characters are wholly believable, reluctantly adapting to "the massive forces shifting around them"."
Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
"Loskutoff reimagines the conventional bleak and brawny novel of the Western mountains, mixing magic and realism in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, and introduces a strangely beguiling Ruthie Fear."
