Fencing the Sky | 
| Author: James Galvin
Category: Book
List Price: $23.00
Buy New: $7.33
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 420589
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 258
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.9 x 1
ASIN: B000F7BPCK
Publication Date: September 30, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
James Galvin opens his first novel with a shocking, seemingly inexplicable murder--horseman Mike Arans closes on a pistol-packing motorist named Merriwether Snipes, throws a rope and snaps his neck--and then proceeds to illuminate why it happened, what it means, and how Mike deals with the consequences. Though billed as a novel, Fencing the Sky is in fact a more deeply fictionalized continuation of The Meadow, Galvin's partly historic, partly imagined evocation of a way of life that took hold on an upland Wyoming ranch for a century and then blew away. If The Meadow is elegiac, Fencing the Sky is angry and blackly humorous. This is the grim, greedy '90s, when swaggering developers like Merriwether Snipes ride the range in their ATV's, carving up the old homesteads into 40-acre ranchettes and making life hell for the few decent people who remain. Galvin makes three of these holdouts his heroes--Oscar Rose, who supports a cattle habit (and family) by working as a vet; Adkisson Trent, a doctor who inherited from his father a spectacular spread and a penchant for proud solitude; and Arans, the renegade, who fled from New Jersey to become a cowboy. The heat of the book rises from the connections and passions of these men--their women and work troubles, their unspoken bond with each other, their fury at Snipes and everything he represents. Galvin, a poet, has assembled his narrative out of vivid shards, yet, despite the jump-cuts, this is an old-fashioned novel at heart, with heroes and villains, heartbreak and suspense, and characters so real you want to ride out and shake hands. The same themes, the same imagery, the same equine adoration crop up in Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, but Galvin has a lighter touch, eschewing myth for the minute particulars of hard work and hard luck in a single community. Galvin can also crack a good joke, even though he knows as well as anyone that there's not a lot to laugh about under the big sky these days. --David Laskin
Product Description
A haunting novel of the American West about an accidental murder that springs from the best intentions.
Stepping his horse through the lush, beaver-worked draw looking for stray cows, Mike Arans never imagined that, moments later, he'd find himself swinging a nylon loop around Merriweather Snipes and pulling until his neck snapped. Once Snipes was dead, Mike fished a notepad and a stub of pencil from his pocket, wrote "I did this," signed his name, and stuffed the note into Snipes's breast pocket. Then Mike rode to his house, stocked up on supplies, and rode due west.
Fencing the Sky is the story of how circumstances spiral out of control, the story of gross indifference and avarice in the face of breathtaking beauty. Ultimately, James Galvin's novel is a book about violence and how it destroys lives when the land is at stake. This long-awaited lyrical first novel is nothing less than the story of the disappearance of the American West.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 A new perspective January 30, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Being from New Jersey, and having a log cabin in upstate NY where I feel I have my own little piece of paradise, this book was a shot to the gut.
When rich city folk buy up most of the unclaimed land out west, and disrespect that land by tearing it up with dirtbikes and ATV's, and spook the cattle and make life hard for the ranchers who have lived there and made livings the hard, good ol' way, it made me change the way I felt about my own cabin. Seeing and feeling how disrespectful these newcomers were is greatly felt through the characters we get to know in this book.
Told through a series of flashbacks while our protagonist is fleeing from the law on horseback, we come to know and love the fugitive who was only standing up for his own moral rights. While this is the main outline for the plot, the deeper, real intention is the abuse the government forced upon landowners and ranchers in the west, claiming rights to dig up land regardless of ownership.
Overall, a sad story that hits home with impact and gives you chills as you turn the last few pages. I particularly enjoyed the last quarter of the book the most. Please read and try to understand the loss many landowners out west feel about the destruction of good land, turned into a 'wilderness escape' for wealthy personel.
 But what a preposterous ending! October 18, 2006
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I love Wyoming, and Galvin brought me to tears more than once with his loving and poetic descriptions of the land, the people who want to protect it, and his indictment of horrible Takers and Users who see only dollar signs in that beauty.
Galvin's message about the land and the Wyoming rancher's fading way of life should be read and treasured. But stop reading this book when you reach Page 235. I wish I had.
PS: or read Galvin's beautiful "The Meadow," also about the Medicine Bow area. Its characters are the people who lived there (composites of them are in "Fencing"), and while the ending is sad, it's believable.
 Brilliant Book July 21, 2006
Exceptional book, beautifully written, powerful story. I've bought as a gift for others many times.
Excellent story, wrong hero November 8, 2005
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
There is no denying that Galvin has weaved an excellent tale in this book. His writing and the story are excellent. You want to know more with each snippet of the story regarding what's going to happen. Even though the scene's change and you don't really want them to change, you are thrilled when they do change because each part of the story is very captivating. The only exception to this is the end of the story. I won't say what happened, but the end read to me as though Galvin got a call from his publisher saying, "Finish it or lose the contract." I felt myself having to totally suspend reality and belief at the end and in general thinking, "this just doesn't fit."
The major drawback to the story is that more often than not, I kept thinking that the hero in the story was missing. The person who is very clearly the 'hero' is not much more than a vigilante, and as such the glorifications of his actions are misplaced. Additionally, the story has as a general idea a lament for the loss of the small time rancher in Wyoming and Colorado. This is not a lament I share. The small time rancher in Wyoming has a great deal of political influence and despite Galvin's depiction of them as hardworking honest folk who only want the best for the land, the political realities are often far from that depiction.
This is a book that will start conversations, especially if you are at all familiar with the current state of events in the Rocky Mountain region. By that standard alone this book does warrant five stars, but because I disagree so heavily with the thesis and because the ending is so poorly constructed, I have to give it four stars.
Fugitive Cowboy On The Run in Wyoming March 17, 2005
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is one of a number of modern Westerns I read in the winter of 2004-05. The others included: J. Robert Lennon's, "On The Night Plain," Annie Proulx' "Close Range"; Mark Spragg's "Fruit Of Stone", Ralph Beer's "The Blind Corral"; Gretel Ehrlich's "Heart Mountain", and David Long's "Blue Spruce", a collection of modern stories. I might also include Wallace Stegner's "Angle Of Repose" which is more of a historical Western though with more contemporary aspects, John Treadwell Nichols' "The New Mexico Trilogy",which seems to me now somewhat dated, or Rick De Marinis' "Year Of The Zinc Penny", set mostly in wartime L.A. in 1943 but about a family with Montana roots. If you only have time to read one--since they are somewhat repetitive, particularly in the areas of cattle or sheep ranching, horsemanship and descriptions of ranch life-- you might choose "Fencing The Sky" since it is one of the best, with Beer's great rather nostalgic novel perhaps second. This is a society in which tradition lasts longer than in some other areas of the country, certainly dating from the late 19th century.
All these novels & stories lament the passing of the Old West, but some--certainly "Fencing The Sky" and "Angle Of Repose" are also strikingly contemporary, dealing with such issues as 60's student radicalism,war service (Lennon, Beer, and Ehrlich) aggressive land development, and considerable ecological problems such as deforestation and strip mining which have laid waste to this part of the country, as Jared Diamond's recent book "Collapse" also attests. Elk and elk hunting, and other naturalistic descriptions, are another subject common to all. At least three of the novels contain quite a lot of romance between siblings growing up on neighboring ranches in what will seem to some, including myself,to be a rather idyllic life, certainly the opposite of urban living.Some of the ranch details are truly inspired, such as a pack rat stealing from a cowboy in the middle of the night, or a square dance. Proulx' amazing award-winning stories are packed with historic details, in a limited space. Cowboys are unfortunately somewhat prone to alcoholism, also. Both Spragg and Galvin use a flashback technique in alternating chapters. Each novel is somewhat unique so that you can enjoy each but all have a great deal in common as well. Spragg's novel is most uniquely notable for its humour--a wayward wife,two old friends, an Indian, a dog, a physicist, and their misadventures.
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