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An Unfinished Life, Mark Spragg
Jonathan Cape
Reviewed by Jan Treliving-Brown (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

Watch out for the film of An Unfinished Life starring Robert Redford and Jennifer Lopez. This tale reminds me of growing up with Mary O'Hara's My Friend Flicka and similar Wyoming-based stories in the Little House on the Prairie genre.

Author Mark Spragg has chosen a modern-day Western family to star in this, his third novel. Old Einar Gilkyson lives on a ranch in Ishawooa, Wyoming, caring for his crippled black Korean war buddy Mitch: "Every morning it shocks him. Einar works his thumbs deeply into the slick, wide ribbons of scar tissue that puzzle Mitch's back, healed purple-black, and then gentler into his sunken side where his right kidney used to be. He watches his white hands massaging Mitch's black skin and can't seem to look at anything else, the difference in the colours fixing his attention, and he knows if he shuts his eyes he'd forget they weren't the same man, that he wasn't working the liniment into some scarred part of himself."

Long lost daughter-in-law Jean turns up unannounced and unwelcome. She's fleeing another abusive boyfriend, another squalid Iowa trailer park. Einar can't cope with Jean or her 10-year-old daughter, Griff. Memories of his dead son Griffin flood in and old Einar is still blaming Jean for too many things.

Little Griff thinks it might be too early to ask why these grown-ups don't like each other: "She wants to stay here...but when her mother's around her grandfather the air feels all staticky, like if you touched either one of them you'd get a shock. She knows she'll have to ask her mother why, because she doesn't want to do whatever her mother's done."

An Unfinished Life is not a blockbuster novel – it's more an elegant, graceful tale of human resolve, the vulnerability of children, women and the disabled. I liked it enough to seek out Mark Spragg's memoir Where Rivers Change Direction and novel The Fruit of Stone.