Douglas Unger
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Leaving the Land: A Novel
Douglas Unger
Leaving the Land deals with contemporary rural America, and it does so with an exceptional fidelity to detail, circumstance, and feeling that captures the modern condition in the countryside: the winds of change bearing down hard on a once remote and deeply rooted way of life.
Douglas Unger has a sharply focused but widely ramifying story to tell. Its compass is 12 miles, the distance between the Hogan farm and the small town of Nowell, off in the desolate “gumbo” land of the western Dakotas. Its principal figure is Marge Hogan, a bright, pretty, spunky girl and then women who dreams of the bright lights of Rapid City but whose destiny is to stay where she is. Early on, she works side by side with her father at the grueling, dispiriting tasks of turkey raising, her two brothers having gone off to World War 11 and both having been killed. Evenings she sadly sorts through men left behind by the war for a husband who can help with the farm and eventually take over. Just as she is about to marry the best of a bad lot, a convoy of trucks arrives in Nowell, along with a man in a snappy…
