August, the main character in the book, reminds me of Ivan Doig characters. Men, often searching for more than what has been given to them. August is a manly man, just as Doig’s are. He has a brain and a conscience. As his mother slowly sinks into mental illness and his father really is just a big windbag with no parenting skills, Austin ends up following his mother from Michigan to Montana, where he’s the new kid in high school. What the reader takes away from this book is how August survived his growing up years surrounding by natural beauty and a variety of people who make August seem like the wisest person around. ( )

Remember, it's AUGUST, not 'Augie." And the title character of Callan Wink's debut novel always makes it a point to introduce himself that way, as August. He didn't like Augie, as it sounded too much like a stupid dog name (i.e. the dog in the GARFIELD comic strip). And in the book's short prologue, his mother, Bonnie, pregnant with him, explains to Dar, his father -

"It's not just the eighth month of the year … It also means respected, illustrious, venerable, 'worthy of admiration' …"

And, as we get to know August, over a period of about a dozen years, from the time he is twelve, growing up on a west Michigan, until he is a young man, working on ranches in Montana, we find that indeed he is - becomes - all of those things in this carefully crafted bildungsroman, set mostly in the post 9/11 years, during the presidency of Bush Two. We know this because August's mother, already bitter and estranged from his father, is a collector of dumb Bush-isms. We learn that Dar and Bonnie, sadly mismatched from the beginning, are in the "life goes on" stage of the Mellencamp song "Jack and Diane" - "long after the thrill of lovin' is gone." And August is already learning to adjust to his lot in a divided household, where his mother lives in the "old house" on the farm, while his father occupies the "new house," co-habiting with a much younger woman, a situation which cannot last. So he follows his mother when she moves out, first to Grand Rapids, and then all the way out to Montana, where she takes a job as a librarian in Bozeman, and August makes the necessary adjustments to being the new kid in high school, and gradually finding his place, although he remains essentially a loner. There are brutal rites of initiation and sexual awakening here that brought to mind Sonny and Duane from McMurtry's THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. There is football, and there is an older woman, from whom he learns that "outside of a certain amount of necessary biological attraction, men and women will continue to be incompatible."

Disillusioned by his affair with the older woman, August spurns college and takes work as a ranch hand, earning his own way, telling his mother at one point, when she urges him to go back to school -

"I fell off a tree into the river today and almost cut my foot off with a chainsaw. I'm fine, don't worry. I wasn't even going to tell you, but to be honest, I'd rather do that every day of the week than go sit in a classroom down in Bozeman."

There are passages here that seem prescient, given that Wink finished AUGUST prior to the present problems of the Coronavirus pandemic. For example this conversation with a store clerk, who expresses his opinion that -

"Only the elite are going to be able to afford Montana beef. The rest of us are going to be scrounging. I'm not sayin it's going to be completely apocalyptic, but it will be lesser doomsday, at the very least … Feel lucky that you live out here. It could be a lot worse. Imagine being in New York City … Think 9/11 times a thousand. I'm preparing. Every time I go to the grocery store, I get a dozen or so extra canned goods. I've got a big root cellar under my house, and I've got shelves of beans, water, blankets, candles, stuff like that."

Or this comment by August's boss, Ancient, as he prepares to bury his father's old horse, who has just died -

"Maybe this is the universe's way of keeping us hopping along. Every time someone or something close to you dies, there's a carcass you have to attend to before it starts to stink. If bodies didn't decay, the dead would be stacking up everywhere …"

As I read the above, I couldn't help but think of the hundreds of dead people in New York City, where the morgues and funeral parlors are scrambling to deal with the pandemic and its victims. Yes. Eerily prescient.

Other reviewers and blurbs have noted similarities in Wink's writing to Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, Hemingway (all Michigan writers) and Proulx. I've been reading all of those esteemed writers for decades, and yeah, I can certainly see those influences. But I thought often too of Saul Bellow, and his 1953 NBA-winning novel, THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH. Because August's journey is that kind of a picaresque one, as he moves from state to state, town to town and job to job, meeting many unique characters and women along the way, as he muddles his way steadily toward maturity.

My initial interest in Callan Wink's work was spurred by the fact that he was a Michigan writer, who grew up not far from my own hometown. (His grandfather, Jim Wink, was a legendary coach at Ferris State University, and the sports arena there now bears his name.) But I quickly decided that he is so much more than just a regional writer. Because AUGUST is just … well, it's just so damn GOOD! It's a coming-of-age story that jumps boundaries with its universal themes and characters so real that they could be your neighbors. I LOVED THIS BOOK. Bravo, Mr Wink. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )