American Copper by Shann Ray

American Copper Reviews

• 
  Russell

  
  In large part because I am embarrassed about how self-important I became after my first book was published, I pay close attention to my fellow writers, and am always amused at how many newly published authors go through a phase where they believe that everything that comes out of their mouth is absolutely brilliant. So it’s always refreshing when someone like Shann Ray comes along, a guy who displays a wonderful sense of perspective. This is probably in large part because Shann, whose real name is Shann Ferch, has already enjoyed the limelight as a star basketball player in high school and college. So getting this kind of attention is nothing new to him.
  Ray’s writing very much reflects the same quiet, patient perspective that he has in real life, which makes him someone that’s easy to root for. I have known many writers that I didn’t admire who wrote books I admired a great deal. And the opposite is also true. But it’s a rare combination when the two come together.
  American Copper is a beautiful book. It reminds me in structure and in tone of Michael Ondaatje’s English Patient, which makes sense considering both writers are excellent poets. Ray builds his story slowly, through images and characters created at his own pace, with one striking paragraph of description after another. Each little gem of detail contributes in some significant way to the overall shape of this thing, this sculpture of words.
  The best way to read this novel is so simply surrender to the flow, with the knowledge that eventually, all of these images are going to come together. Ray uses multiple points of view, moving from a Native American team roper, Black Kettle, to a wealthy young copper heiress, Evelynne Lowry, to a monosyllabic horse trainer and fighter, a huge man named Zion, with ease and grace, and eventually these three lives become intertwined in ways that are unexpected but masterfully conveyed.
  But perhaps the best part of this novel is the fact that Ray tells a simple story that somehow manages to address many of the most important issues of the American West, a subject that he is passionate about. American Copper touches on racism, the damaging effects of self-sufficiency, and the complicated marriage between commerce and the environment in a way that doesn’t draw attention to itself. It ends up being, surprisingly, a love story.
  With American Copper, Shann Ray, whose story collection American Masculine also deftly addressed many of these same issues, has established himself as an important voice in the literature of the American West.
  
• 
  Nancy Freund

  An absolutely beautiful book of family love and the limits of loyalty. Don't be put off by my alliteration here. Shann Ray's every page is truly lyrical and a sensory experience of the American West unlike any I've read yet. Horses, bears, mountains and rivers and ridges and flowers. And butterflies and copper. It's 'Lonesome Dove' but without a self-conscious sweeping musical score set to it. (It's more real, somehow... and I absolutely love 'Lonesone Dove.' But what I mean is that this novel seems to be written for its own sake, for the story it tells, without regard to any possible Hollywood deal or more money to be made elsewhere on it. The story itself reflects this authenticity and immediacy too). It's 'All the Pretty Horses' with a fullness of viewpoint that can only be achieved when characters are presented as real people, with real regrets and desires and goals, even when the outcomes of their dreams might not mirror an expected narrative arc. Maybe it's not as "neat" as Cormac McCarthy would write it, and therein lies the magic. It's Stanley Gordon West's people from 'Blind Your Ponies' looking back a few generations. It's so much more than the American West, though. It's Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' and Ngugi Wa Thing'o's 'The River Between,' and it's Nathan McCall's memoir 'Makes Me Wanna Holler' in its moving revelation of the lasting nature of racial tension, white man versus the original inhabitants of a place, and the ways in which these tensions are both eased and often times brought to a head, toward violent ends and sometimes, something that looks a little bit like progress. I can't believe I'm the first person reviewing this thing on Goodreads. I'm so grateful this novel found its way to me so early in its public life. I have a feeling I may be the first of MANY who will grant this work five stars, and who will live with William Black Kettle, Evelynne Lowry, Middie Zion, and the other important PEOPLE (not characters) for a very long time.
• 
  Katie Andraski

  These days women are portrayed as heroes running through woods, flashing swords, guns or light sabers, showing men how to be accurate shots, how to be brave. These are flashy, slender -- always slender -- heroes -- but not women I can relate to.
  When American Book Award winner Shann Ray skyped into the Writers As Readers book club, he said an impetus for writing American Copper was his “love for his grandma, wife, daughter. Their fierceness.”
  
  In the book, Evelyn’s powerful dad shapes her strength, confidence and ability to love but won’t let go. She also grieves with a sorrow that throttles her. She kicks clear of both. She doesn’t hate her father, even though, as a copper baron, he tries to possess everything. She chooses to love a man.
  
  Sharon wondered how forgiveness showed up in American Copper when Ray emphasizes it in his TED talk and his life’s work. “I embedded things in quiet ways throughout the novel. Think of Evelyn as a soul bearing moral presence. She, like many of the women I know, are never going to decide for evil against an intimate connection to the wilderness. They will never decide against intimacy,” he says.
  
  I sat up. I want to be like that: a woman who chooses intimacy over a hard heart, who finds it impossible to choose evil. I want to stand up.
  
  
• 
  David Abrams

  If I compared a book to a twilit mountain range washed in purples and oranges and reds, the sight of it causing you, the reader who has trudged through a dull landscape of ordinary novels, to stumble in your sojourn and fall to one knee in reverence for the toothy horizon; and if I said reading this particular novel was as bracing and invigorating as drinking from a cold, clear alpine stream; and if I said it was gorgeous as a coffee-table book and deeply meditative as the Book of Psalms; and if I said just one book can, however briefly, change the way you look at both the natural world and human nature—if I said all that, you’d want to read this book, wouldn’t you?
  
  Good, glad to hear it, because American Copper by Shann Ray is all this, and more. And if you think I’m overstating the qualities of this novel set in Montana, well then my dear friend, it’s obvious you haven’t read it. I’m here to help you correct that oversight.
  
  American Copper has a huge timesweep, from the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to the years just before World War II, but it is, at heart, an intimate novel. It traces the intertwined lives of three individuals: Evelynn Lowry, daughter of a copper baron who all but owns the city of Butte, Montana; William Black Kettle, a Native American who works the rodeo circuit and longs for peace in the midst of violence; and a bear of a man named Middie who ends up working as a bouncer on a passenger train.
  
  American Copper is a stunning work of fiction which begs the reader to sit quietly, block the loud static of everyday living, and slip into the gulfstream of an author’s sure-handed prose which is at once muscular and gentle. Ray himself says it best in this sentence lifted from the pages of the novel: "The language in his mouth was stark and eloquent, warrior-like one minute but in the next moment as light-filled as water, and as lovely."
• 
  Holly Weiss

  Set a century ago in Montana, the book explores xenophobia towards the Cheyenne and Chinese. The plot moves slowly, but the book is redeemed by lyrical, almost mystical writing.
• 
  Robert Morgan Fisher

  This is one beautiful book. A complete page-turner. I read the last 150 pages in one sitting. If you liked Denis Johnson's TRAIN DREAMS or Robert Bausch's AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE, you'll love this action-packed, poetic story set in early 20th century Montana. Few books that I can think of really capture the clash of Native American culture and ruthless capitalism. One of the best novels of 2015.
• 
  Jane Van Hof

  Beautifully strong and poetic prose.
• 
  Nancy

  I won a copy of American Copper by Shann Ray from The Quivering Pen blog by David Abrams. When his review of the book posted, extolling the beauty of Ray's language, I set it on the To Be Read Next pile. Abrams wrote, "If I said just one book can, however briefly, change the way you look at both the natural world and human nature--if I said all that, you'd want to read this book, wouldn't you?"
  
  American Copper is a story of racism and the evil in men, and it is a love story.
  
  In the first decades of the 20th c, automobiles are seen in the Butte, Montana streets but rodeo competitions still run the circuit. Native Americans and Chinese are considered sub-human, and gangs are free to deal out punishments to those who step out of line. Copper has made immigrant Baron Josef Lowry not only rich but the most powerful man around, his arm reaching to Washington, D.C. He is obsessed with wealth and controls everyone in his life, especially his son and daughter. After losing his wife he commands his children to never marry; he needs them he says, and he intends to pass his copper mines and wealth to their care.
  
  His daughter Evelynne is given everything she physically needs. Her father teaches her about the natural world and gathers her poetry for publication back east. After her brother's death, Evelynne's grief turns her into a recluse. Reaching womanhood, Eve longs to escape her ivory tower and searches for a man strong enough, or audacious enough, to stand up to her father and take her away.
  
  The evil that inhabits men, and the capacity for love is explored in eloquent prose.
  
  I am glad to have read this book.
  
  The book cover blurbs include the marvelous Andra Barrett, whose historical short stories in Ship Fever and Servants of the Map I adore, wrote, "This grave, unusual novel unfolds with a beautiful evenhandedness, balancing the outer world and inner life, Cheyenne and white experiences of early 20th-century Montana. Ray's feel for the heart and soul of Montana and its people--all its people--graces every page."
  
  And Dave Eggers, author of the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and A Hologram for a King, called the book "Lyrical, prophetic, brutal, yet ultimately hopeful."
  
  Others compared this first novel's writing to Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plains.
  
• 
  Jeri Rowe

  This is a beautifully written book. The plot moves slow, between a giant of a man named Middie and Cheyenne roper known simply as William Black Kettle. It's set more than a century ago in Montana, and both men are bound by their love of a woman, a poet, the daughter of a copper baron. Yet, Ray's writing erases problems of a slow-moving plot. It's reminiscent of Kevin Powers' "Yellow Birds.'' What's interesting with both Powers and Ray is that their both poets, men whose music is found with the syncopation of words. That was easily seen in "Yellow Birds.'' And it's seen here.
• 
  Dustincecil

  3.5 stars... I think... LOVED the pace, and steady build-up of the first half of this book.
  In the end though- esp. the treatment of Zion seemed rushed and unresolved.
  
  I probably should sleep on it a few more days, to let my thoughts on this sink in. I felt disappointed in each of the seemingly strong, brave, and fearless characters- In my opinion, I didn't like that each essentially ran away from their problems.
  
  5 stars though, for beautiful use of language!
• 
  Lisa

  I didn't love this book, but it will stay with me. It reminded me of "True Grit". Like that book, the setting seemed as important as the characters; in fact, one might argue that the setting fulfilled the role of antagonist.
  
  I think that's why I kept reading it - I felt that I was reading something true and powerful about early 20th century Montana.
  
• 
  Kristin

  "We must make peace again," William declared. "We can live in dignity, as friends who respect and care for each other. I am neither your slave nor your enemy. I am your fellow man."
• 
  Sherri Lynch

  Very poetic and relaxing summer read!
• 
  meheadhurts

  August Readathon 2023 TBR Knockdown #5 Recurring Reads - book that's been on shelf for ages.
  
  I heard this author reading from this book while browsing a bookstore, and picked it up a year later. And there it sat on my shelf. Made it as runner up when choosing books for a book challenge, but never quite made the final cut. Even came w/ me when I recently moved. Glad I finally read it. very atmospheric, a bit slow moving (not a bad thing- it fit the overall style and mood of the book), lovely prose. I think my reading tastes have shifted a bit in the last 10 years, so probably best I waited until now to read it. I liked the sparseness of the prose in some of the shorter chapters, and the author was still able to convey so much in just a few words.
• 
  Megan Codera

  This story has the deep swell and sigh of a river - wild and unpredictable, forcing reflection and patience at each bend and then snatching away some things so suddenly, never to be seen again. A reminder that we are nothing but the next choices we make, the next places we go. All that matters is how we choose to connect with the world now, and tomorrow.
• 
  Jill

  True Ray's writing is lyrical and poetic matched by few. The vignettes are beautiful to read for the language alone. As a story, I struggled to stay interested because of the lack of dialogue. The overwhelming use of description and narration made the characters less relatable and kept the reader outside of the story.
• 
  Jamie

  Enjoyed the writing style! Very lyrical.
• 
  Ryan Schmidt

  Favorite quote: “There are only two races of men, he told himself. Decent and unprincipled.”
• 
  Julie

  This is a fine example of literary fiction. The plot is secondary to the characters and the lyrical writing. The Montana landscape is ever-present as a backdrop to the drama. It is said about certain novels that the landscape is a character in its own right, which feels accurate in this case.
  
  The writing is lean, spare, and elegant, luminous and muscular. The opening sentence is one of the best I’ve read:
  
  “Daily, men descended into the earth, going where no man belonged, taking more than men deserved, their faces wracked with indifference, their hands dirtied with soot from the depths of the mountain.”
  
  It’s written from an omniscient point of view, so Ray is able to give us a taste of many characters’ points of view—the early 20th-century copper baron, his daughter Evelynne, her two love interests (Zion and William), the Cheyenne chief during a 19th-century massacre, his descendent William and William’s parents.
  
  In two-character scenes, the writing switches between points of view in a masterful way that is never confusing. This is not easy to do. The price the author pays, though, is to keep a certain distance from everyone. We may get a brief glimpse into someone’s head, but rarely into their heart. It is rarely affecting or moving.
  
  The result is an evenness that feels one-dimensional. The emotion is kept at arm’s length, even in the most dramatic life and death scenes. I read out of enjoyment of the writing and to discover what happens to the characters, but I wasn’t fully invested in their stories.
  
  The novel moves back and forth in time, as well as shifting between characters. For plot aficionados, it takes a bit of reading to arrive at the inciting incidents, one for each main plot line. They come, one right after another, about 25% of the way into the story. The first is the death of Evelynne’s beloved brother, Tomas. The second is the 19th-century massacre of the Cheyenne at Sandy Creek.
  
  For a while, Evelynne is an Emily Dickinson sort of character—reclusive, delicate. But she is more than that, a unique frontierswoman who comes to know her own heart. She has the strength finally to liberate herself from her father’s tyranny, and also to acknowledge that her love for him is undying. One might argue that she finds that strength through her love for another man, which is not exactly feminist, but it is probably historically accurate.
  
  The back-stories of each character are meted out with restraint and control. One of the best examples of this is that we learn a critical detail about Evelynne’s copper baron father right at the end of the book, as he is dying. A-ha moments like this were very satisfying.
  
  There is at times a mythic quality to the writing that is fresh, not derivative. We are treated to several scenes of the Cheyenne in their camp, doing quotidian things like making food and clothing, caring for family and animals. These details are presented unselfconsciously. Their intimacy with each other and with the land is nicely contrasted with the cold opulence and greed of the copper baron’s environment. His unquenchable ambition to own and control and extract.
  
  Other than the emotional distance from the characters, my only quibble with this book is the story arc of Zion, the drifter who briefly catches Evelynne’s eye. As a character, he fills the important role of showing the downside of extreme self-reliance and independence. He fears intimacy because of the tragic loss of both parents during his childhood, but the later scenes with him drag. There’s a mystery on a moving train—a series of robberies and a murder that he’s supposed to investigate. And it ends dramatically, but seems to have little or nothing to do with the main two storylines.
  
  Two of the best scenes that crystallize the main themes are when Eve’s friend, her father’s house man Chan, asks her, “Whose county stands by as its people collapse? Whose country abuses the Chinese, the Indian, the black man, even the poor white, and gives only to the rich white? Whose country binds me to this place?” And this rumination by Zion, after he helps William escape from the men who have just lynched his lifelong friend Raymond: “There are only two races of men, he told himself. Decent and unprincipled.”
  
  Ray’s gift is that he can show all this without preaching or getting political. The writing is subtle and the themes are Shakespearean in scope. Love, family, loyalty and betrayal, violence and grief, greed and competition, the oppressive brutality of bigotry, poetics and beauty as a response to loss and hardship. And always the timeless redemptive power of the landscape.
  
• 
  Jenny Shank

  
  http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/...
  
  Published: 24 December 2015 04:03 PM, Dallas Morning News
  
  The history of white people’s settlement of the West is rife with massacres of native people, mistreatment of Chinese laborers, women trapped into working as prostitutes in gritty frontier outposts, and the Copper Kings’ periodic crushing of miners’ attempts to organize.
  
  Stories of the era continue to appeal in part because these stark conflicts arise against a landscape of incredible openness and beauty: “Here’s a fight over a place worth fighting for” seems to be a central theme of Western stories.
  
  In Shann Ray’s gorgeous, sensitive debut novel, a ruthless Montana man who amasses a fortune in the copper industry finds that he cannot control his own children, no matter how forcefully he tries. American Copper merges the brutality and the beauty of the West into a kind of lush hymn, filled with stark events but also a strand of hope for a better way, forged through familial love.
  
  Ray begins his lyrical novel in 1907 by introducing a princess locked away in a castle: Evelynne Lowry, the lovely daughter of Josef Lowry, “who had more money than the Montana State Treasury.” Ray explains his business simply: “His men dug copper from the ground. He sent it by train to the centers of industry.”
  
  Josef’s wife died when Evelynne was young, leaving him with a son and daughter whom he loves but is determined to bend to his will. Josef intends his children to stay with him and serve his business. In a characteristic, cruel way, he breaks the engagement of his son, Tomás, to a woman he met after his return from service in World War I. When Josef learns the woman’s father is a butcher in St. Louis, he opens a competing butcher shop across the street and bullies him out of business.
  
  Both children know that their father’s outbursts can also turn deadly.
  
  Spirited, athletic, horse-besotted Evelynne is the only person in Josef’s orbit who can stand up to him. When her father tells her, “You must never marry. I need you,” it doesn’t seem likely that she’ll heed him until a terrible loss prompts her retreat from the world.
  
  After introducing the Lowry family, Ray drops back in time to 1864 and the perspective of Black Kettle, the Cheyenne chief at the helm when Colorado Territory militia broke a treaty and attacked a peaceful settlement of Cheyenne and Arapaho in an incident that has become known as the Sand Creek Massacre.
  
  Ray details this brutality with minimalist restraint. Simple facts such as this one about the bloodthirsty leader of the militia make their point without any extraneous commentary: “[John] Chivington, nicknamed the Fighting Parson, was presiding elder of Denver’s First Methodist Episcopal Church.”
  
  While Evelynne is “tutored, nannied, dressed in fine clothes, and set alone among the wilderness,” two young men who will cross paths with her have very different upbringings in Montana. Zion, an unusually tall, strong young man, raised in a one-room cabin, becomes a steer wrestler in rodeos across Montana. William Black Kettle, a descendant of the Cheyenne chief, is educated by nuns who “indoctrinated him into the subtle, if profound idea that beauty would save the world.”
  
  Beloved by his tribe, the charismatic, intelligent William is the closest thing they have to a prince. William must leave his tribe to make a living as a rodeo calf roper, occasionally meeting Zion, who treats him much better than most whites he encounters.
  
  Through horses and rodeo, the stories of the two men connect with that of Evelynne just when she is contemplating how to make a getaway from her father’s figurative tower.
  
  Will the princess manage to find a prince in a West where racism is lifeblood and violence is perpetual? That is the question. Ray has a knack for harnessing the elemental, fashioning a story from the interplay of competing forces: violence and gentleness, hate and love, ugliness and beauty, masculine and feminine. Prepare to be enchanted by American Copper, a novel that is at once brutally realistic and dreamlike.
  
  Jenny Shank’s first novel, “The Ringer,” won the High Plains Book Award.
• 
  Monica

  A treat to read. As a kid from Montana, this holds the history and place we knew growing up. The harshness of the land is well portrayed next to disparate personalities Well done
• 
  Carl R.

  Shann Ray’s debut novel, American Copper, is almost scary good. From the delicate poetry of the opening pages wherein Evelynne Lowry’s father, Josef, enthuses about a flight of copper-colored monarch butterflies to the horrible beating of two honorable Indian rodeo performers, this is a book of contrasts and extremes.
  
  Josef builds an enormous Montana copper empire in the early twentieth century. He is both a sentimental drunk with a deep attachment to daughter and family and a sentimental drunk with a tyrannical streak that borders on the monstrous. Zion is a lonely steer wrestler and itinerant brawler from the Montana high country who was orphaned at an early age, is starved for affection, and is at a loss to express the tender feelings that churn within him. William Black Kettle is the grandson of the Cheyenne chief whose band was the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre, one of the most infamous of all the iniquities visited on Native Americans during the North American campaign to rid the country of them. Evelynne’s world, an isolated, sensitive world of poetry, becomes entwined with that of all three men. Hers is a soul as unique as her circumstances, and Shann takes us on a journey not quite like any other as we follow how she deals with the men and events that surround her.
  
  American Copper is about the butterflies and their fragile beauty as well as about the metal that is blasted out of the rocks so violently and which creates corrupting wealth for owners and abject wretchedness for workers. It is in turn about the majesty of the men and mountains of the American west as well as about the merciless genocide that grew from the conflicts of the native people and the invaders. And it is about the accommodation that love and devotion make possible in the midst of a world that is often filled with hate and terror.
  
  Someone somewhere once said that you might measure the quality of a work of art by the amount of reality it encompasses. By that criterion, American Copper is way up on the scale. More, Shann, more.
• 
  Patty

  I first read about American Copper in my local newspaper and was quite intrigued. I am very interested in the history of my new home state; the good and the bad. Montana is known as the treasure state and it has a wealth of them – underground and above. It’s a land of coal, silver, copper, and gold below and of unparalleled beauty above. It has exploited both since it was discovered much to the resident’s detriment and benefit. One only has to see Glacier, Yellowstone or any of the state parks to appreciate the beauty and then look to the Berkeley Pit or any of the many other Superfund sites in the state for the destruction ravaged upon the state in the service of the mining industry.
  
  But American Copper is so much more than a book about copper mining, it’s my 5th 5 star book of the year. It takes place in the early part of the last century. It was a time of growth and expansion for the country and Montana. Mr. Ray has a magical way with words and is especially skilled with creating mood and drawing his reader into the world of his characters.
  
  The book is at it’s heart a story, as they say, as old as time. In more ways than one. Perhaps it’s really two stories; the story of the love of two men for one woman and the story of the evil that is done to those deemed different. In this case it’s the Cheyenne and to a degree the Chinese. The plot is not one I’d call fast paced but the writing is so magical it carries you along as you read about the good, bad and just awful of the loves and lives of the characters in American Copper.
• 
  Julie

  This reminded me of Legends of the Fall. Ok, maybe not quite as masterful as that, but pretty darn close! It is the story of the daughter of a Copper Baron in Montana in the 1920's. She is gifted and beautiful, but her father is quite the tyrant. It is about her loves and losses. It weaves the stories of several lives together, in a beautiful epic tale. I don't know much about writing style, but I really liked the language in this book. Short, clipped, but still very expressive. It has the underlying themes of racism against Native Americans and money vs. nature. All heartbreakingly beautiful!
• 
  Maureen

  Some may disagree with my classification of American Copper as historical fiction. Can't recall that it referenced any important figures of the time but the whole was so saturated with history, that it deserves the designation, in my humble opinion. I must admit, that it took quite a while for me to commit to finishing the book. The prose is so close to poetry and the unfolding is singular, like nothing I've ever read. However, this is a novel that encourages the reader to feel changed by reading it, that says so much about being human and holds so well to love conquering violence. It's not to be missed!
• 
  Amy (Bossy Bookworm)

  3.75 stars for me. The voice in the first section felt stilted (purposely old-fashioned while recounting events from an earlier time, possibly?). Later, I felt at times like I was reading poetry, and the descriptions of the Montana settings were soft and lovely. The characters' intertwined stories included vicious cruelty toward Indians in the late 1800s/early 1900s, possessive and controlling attitudes toward women, and other painful-to-read elements, but also gentle adoration, meditations on nature, and richly wrought internal struggles and growth.
• 
  Sagely

  A beautifully executed novel.
  
  Shann Ray offers slowly, piece by piece, a strong yet restrained story. Is it tragedy? romance? biblical epic? I can't say.
  
  Ray presents an early 20th century Montana that is both other but also true to my years in the state. The landmarks remain; the diction and pacing remain. But reading these pages, I can't help but feel how much of Montana I've failed to know, to see.
  
  American Copper belongs on a shelf next to Ivan Doig's This House of Sky. It's that good.
• 
  Bea

  The author does a wonderful job with relationships and feelings. Some of the descriptive writing was beautiful. It takes place around Butte, Montana and a lot in Wyoming, starting in 1907 and finishing in 1935. It concerned a very rich copper miner and his family. I thought the plot was a little slow (will the rich daughter really find love eventually?) The Indians seemed so good and fair while the whites seemed unprincipled and mean. The main characters were good, though the rich father, Joseph, was way too evil. It was kind of sad, but uplifting at the same time.