Setting
The story is set in the very, very small confines of a Montana community called Arlee. Arlee is not simply another small town, however. The setting will become a primary element in the significance of the story. Imagery is used very early on the book to situate the details:
“Small roads jut like tributaries into 93, bearing names such as McClure Road, Couture Loop, and Lumpry Road. To visitors, they mean little; to residents, they speak of family. For about a quarter of a mile the highway briefly splits to accommodate Arlee’s downtown. A handful of businesses line the northbound side of the road: a huckleberry-themed restaurant and coffee shop, a feedstore, a pizza joint, a bar, and Wilson Family Foods, or, as everyone calls it, the Store. Visitors do not always realize they are guests of a sovereign nation: the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT). One mile later Arlee is gone.”
More Setting
The plain fact of the matter about Montana is that aside from setting, there isn’t much there to inspire imagery. Basketball, sure, but that is obvious. Arlee is significant to the story and so the essential literary tool for description is integral. The rest is pure poetry:
“The land was fat, the hills green, cottonwoods shedding by the rivers and the aspen draws smelling sweet and dusty. Huckleberries grew in thick bunches, deer filled the hayfields in the evening, and the sun set far behind Saddle Mountain at 10:00 P.M. High in the mountains, under dark timber, trout slurped the surface of empty lakes. The boys had names for places that didn’t appear on maps. They worried about nothing, except maybe running into a grizzly bear.”
Family
This is a story about what is essentially an entire outsider community. It is not simply one of those sports stories about an outside athlete. Since the reservation is an outsider community, it is only natural that family is situated as overwhelmingly important to everybody:
“Sophomore year started. Will drove his siblings to school in Chasity’s Durango, even though he didn’t have a license. When he came home, he saw Sophie sitting in the window. She waved at him, and he at her, and everything changed. She suffered heart ailments and lost weight. It was as though, after she finally came to a reluctant agreement with the inevitabilities of age, centripetal forces made up for lost time. A new confusion drifted in and out of her sharp mind. The Tribes provided a caretaker to help around the house. It was no longer Will picking her up when she fell.”
Off the Court
The thing about sports stories is there is always a world going on. Too often the story doesn’t include that context and the result can make the sports story itself seem a little hollow. That is not the case at all in this story A lot is going on off the court here and the surrounding context takes it out of the sports arena to make it more about the larger setting:
“Under the sheen of smoke the sun resembled a peach; the moon, a plum. The ongoing wildfires prompted Montana’s governor, Steve Bullock, to declare a state of emergency, and an air-quality specialist referred to the smoke as `a hideous brown spiral of misery and despair.’ Greg Whitesell agreed with that: his summer job had been mowing lawns, and it felt as if he were chewing on the smoke.”
