MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewAmerica has always had an uncomfortable relationship with its intellectuals — there’s no shortage of evidence lately that hostility toward nuance and sensitivity is a winning strategy in this country. Based on his debut novel, August, Callan Wink seems both attuned to this unfortunate condition of American life and prey to it, which is too bad. A writer with his gifts should feel more comfortable wielding them ... What’s less clear is how we’re supposed to feel about August. As a teenager, he thinks and speaks in the laconic language of a middle-aged malcontent of Raymond Carver’s. No time for women. No stomach for dancing. P.B.R. and pickup trucks: Those are OK ... Wink’s powers are stunning when he describes in crisp, unsentimental prose the physical world framing August’s journey: the breath of cattle on a midwinter day, the taste of raw milk from a Mason jar. But as our guide to this rugged landscape, August is less a person than a caricature, pretentiously unpretentious ... At root, Wink seems to want it both ways — to criticize all that tough-guy distancing while regularly indulging it. In several awkward passages, he sidles into complex ideas but doesn’t want to own them ... Any well-educated American man who grew up in flyover country will be familiar with the pressures, which foster a kind of bipolar intellectual insecurity ... Wink, who is both a short story writer and a fly-fishing guide in Montana, would do well to avoid such traps, though it’s obvious where his affinities lie ... Despite his abundance of lyrical talent, we’ll be sure not to mistake him for some effete literary type.
