Callan Wink is an understated writer who doesn’t go in for obvious symbolism, choosing instead details that bring the backdrop of his fiction to life ... It is an elegant, considered novel that charts the joys and traumas that shape an individual. Wink eschews drama for the ordinary revelations of everyday life, but that’s not to say that nothing dramatic happens ... What it means to be a young man growing up in the heartland of America is deftly explored. Wink is interested less in the dramas themselves than in the response of his protagonist ... Those looking for a classical Hollywood structure will be disappointed. There is little build or resolution around events. The narrative progresses as time moves forward and characters come and go. They are no less memorable for it ... The details of farm life in August’s early days in Michigan, his stint in the city and his time spent working for farmer Ancient in rural Montana are all brightly rendered. This rich, clear prose has the rare quality of making anything seem interesting, from the mechanics of a baler machine to the backdrop of a dive bar. Wink’s writing has the deceptive simplicity of greats such as Hemingway or Carver, and the melancholy and pathos underpinning the book has echoes of John Williams’s Stoner ... a writer who is able to take a step back, to flip the obvious on its head.
For readers who have been missing this kind of vivid realism, it’s pleasing to report that a successor to this writing school has emerged ... A synopsis of Wink’s book may also lead one to wonder what in the hell happened; there is plenty of time and room while reading it to observe that not a great deal does. Initially, you may find the understated nature of this character and his world to be perplexing, possibly dull: drama is portioned out into increments, and many episodes end quietly. But August is funny in a way — over time its small-scale rhythms and monosyllabic reactions generate a comforting beauty that settles in. You develop an ease with its pace, and a curiosity in the ordinary. Montana especially is strongly evoked; I found myself looking up the one-horse towns, rivers, and reservoirs appearing here on Google Maps. In the end, Wink provides some palpable satisfaction, enough so that it’s fair to think that the book is a worthy entry in the tradition, and deserving of the time spent with it.
America 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.
Wink’s first book, Dog Run Moon, was a collection of short stories — and so in many ways is this, his first novel. Indeed an early set piece about 12-year-old August killing cats that have overrun the family barn appeared as a story in The New Yorker in 2012. It’s also by no means the only one in the book that seems to be setting up a significant plotline that is instantly abandoned. Between the bouts of feline slaughter, August’s mother informs him that she’s aiming to become a breatharian: someone who requires no food and lives on air alone. And with that, the subject is never mentioned again ... add up to an increasingly absorbing picture of rural Montana in all its unacknowledged strangeness ... Fortunately too the longer the book goes on — and the more we adapt to its languorous rhythms — the clearer it becomes how deftly the lack of affect is being used to reinforce Wink’s central point: that August is a stranger to himself. The unknowability of other people and the difficulties of knowing ourselves are scarcely unknown themes in fiction, but rarely can they have been so wholeheartedly rendered — or embodied — as they are here, with the book’s own inscrutability reflecting that of its main character ... 'You’ve been working for me for a while now,' Ancient tells August during one bar visit, 'and I pretty much don’t know a damn thing about you.' It’s a sentiment that most readers will share. Yet by that time it’s also apparent that, in a neat paradoxical twist, this is exactly what makes August such a penetrating and ultimately sympathetic character study.
While August’s inner turmoil is often opaque, the novel offers an uncannily sympathetic and human portrayal of a struggling youth ... Wink’s prose is simple and unadorned. He expresses with pleasing authenticity the fidgety conversations between a father and son struggling to connect, the vacant eyes of a friend muddled by hard liquor and despair, and the nervously chuckled apologies of the day after. The details make the story utterly believable, and for that reason, a pleasing and fascinating read. With August, Callen Wink imitates life with deftness and style, further distinguishing him as a rising writer.
...a beguiling coming-of-age tale about an introverted Michigan boy who is uprooted from his family’s farm after his parents’ divorce and finds himself in Montana living with his mother, an NPR-addicted librarian whose choice of a new home was dictated by seeing Brad Pitt in A River Runs through It ... A sensitive, extremely well wrought novel.
...[an] accomplished debut novel ... Wink takes an assured, meandering approach to narrating August’s life, as August creeps toward adulthood through a series of minor adventures, such as mending fences, drinking at the local watering hole, and learning how to dance. Wink brilliantly captures the stultifying effects of small-town life and the tension between free-spirited August and those stuck in the Montana 'suckhole,' concluding with a stunning, indelible image from August’s rearview mirror. Like a current Jim Harrison, Wink makes irresistable drama out of an individual’s search for identity in landscapes that are by turns romantic and limiting.
