A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How To Do

As a Montana novelist myself (Leaves On Frozen Ground; Guernica Editions), this is embarrassing to admit, but I’d read only one of fellow Montana novelist Pete Fromm’s books before buying his latest novel, A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How To Do. That’s a long title, but the read is worth it.

I’ll talk about his book in a moment. But let’s jump back in history about thirty years. I had just finished my first book,  Born Again At The Laundromat, a collection of essays about living in the west. Fromm’s collection, Indian Creek Chronicles, came out about the same time.

I ended up buying it, and I was enthralled with the story and his writing. At the time, as I recall, Fromm was living in an isolated tent in the mountains in the middle of the winter, guarding a fish-monitoring station on an obscure creek. To an outdoorsman like me, it sounded like paradise. Every week or so Fromm jumped on his snowshoes and walked to town – a distance of nearly twenty miles. As anyone who has spent any time on snowshoes will tell you, that is a very long ways to walk on snowshoes. 

His book won rave reviews, and while my book also had good reviews, sales soon stalled. Fromm, on the other hand, went on to establish himself as an excellent western novelist. And yet I’d never read one of his novels until just a few months ago. That changed when I picked up A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How To Do.

The story centers around Taz, a carpenter, and Marnie, his wife. Marnie dies in childbirth, leaving Taz the sole proprietor of a baby girl. What follows over the rest of the narrative is superbly written, gripping, and spoken from the heart. Fromm’s writing has exactly the right mix of insightful commentary on the human condition and more than enough superlative word craft to keep a long-time (and highly critical) writer like me engaged from beginning to end. 

The upshot is that as soon as I get out from under the stack of books I’m currently reading, I’ll be buying another Fromm novel. He’s got eleven of them, so I have plenty to choose from.