The Sometimes-Unwanted and Occasionally-Beautiful Binds of Family, Farming, and Place

It's All There in Robert Rebein's 2024 Novel, "The Last Rancher"

As one with an ADHD diagnosis from early adulthood, I have a strong preference for 200-page books with short chapters. You know, so I can get through them. However, there is a caveat to the preference, and it is that if you asked me what my favorite books are, I would give you a list that consists of much-longer novels that tend to cover several decades worth of a particular family. Books like Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, and Jonathon Franzen’s Freedom. Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, also fits the bill, even if it’s nonfiction. And now, I can throw another such story on the list: Robert Rebein’s recent novel, The Last Rancher.

The Last Rancher is both serious and comical in parts, a story that takes place in the author’s hometown of Dodge City, Kansas, a place I’ve never been and yet the kind of place I might try to speak up for on occasion. A place that probably doesn’t get much national (or state-level) attention even though the people who live there have lives that are as real as anyone else’s in a state that hasn’t voted blue in a presidential election since 1964, though they did go for Franklin Delano Roosevelt the first two times. Looks like the population of Dodge City hovers just under 28,000, and if The Last Rancher is any indication, its heat and wind aren’t any picnic.

The structure of The Last Rancher is such that it spreads out disparate point-of-views by chapter, spanning a father and Patriarch of the family (Leroy), his wife Caroline, an older and a younger adult son (Michael the lawyer and Jimmy the weed grower), and an adult grad student daughter, Annie. To be human is to want something, and all of these characters (and other secondary ones who aren’t given the same point-of-view privilege) do want something, both collectively (what brings them together in the novel is an attempt to save the harvest when Leroy is severely injured in a serious accident on the road) and individually: Leroy wants to defeat his rival Byron Branch; Michael wants to spend more time in Dodge City while not throwing all his time at corporate lawyer life and his money at keeping up with the Jones; Annie, on the verge of thirty, wants professional, relational, and geographical clarity; and Jimmy wants to put some distance between himself and his family’s ranch life, which to him basically means California.

The shifts in point-of-view aren’t necessarily equal or predictable in terms of who gets the attention, and of course the different characters interact across their differing points of view. It seemed to me like Annie gets the most attention, though I’m not claiming that empirically (I haven’t spent enough time or energy checking into that) so much as I believe she is the character who comes most alive in the book with perhaps Jimmy coming in second. Rebein’s previous books are nonfiction, and so I know that this is the first time he’s inventing characters in such great length.

I’ve heard Rebein say he was most influenced to use the structure of The Last Rancher by reading Franzen’s The Corrections, and here’s where I must admit that I know Rebein. I was a student of his a little more than a decade ago, but I have also worked at the institution in Indianapolis where he has been a professor and department chair and even an interim dean of the liberal arts school.

I have three college degrees; only one professor from any of those pursuits ever picked up the phone and called me, as Rebein once did after reading my essay for admission into a program where he was working as the grad director at the time. It struck me then and it strikes me more now: someone who does that has his feet solidly on the ground where he is. On the call, Rebein told me he would find some funding and a teaching opportunity if I came to school there, and he did. I would go on to take some 60 percent of my degree with him and he would include for a time in his writing group. I worked with him on an independent literature study in which we read The Corrections, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. Rebein correctly talked me out of trying to include David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, but for my money he can have The Corrections; it was American Pastoral that was more my jam.

Though The Last Rancher was a book I would have enjoyed even if I didn’t know Rebein, I’ll also admit that one of the joys of reading it was the degree to which it brings together so much of what I know to be important threads of his life: where he’s from, family life, youth sports (especially wrestling), Catholic belief and culture, animals and farm life, serious study of literature, and the kind of geographic hopping that was all but required of an aspiring professor at a time when new English professorships in literature and creative writing still posted.

I don’t remember the title of my paper in the independent study with Rebein, and I don’t have it in front of me, but I do remember that my inquiry was into what I might have called “male alienation.” The lack of intimacy from which so many men try to live their lives, and even now Rebein’s Leroy fits the bill. He has such great potential as a get-the-work-done-at-all-costs character, though the nature of who he is also sort of necessitates that the amount of emotion we get from him is limited for most of the way, though we do see some compelling and believable movement in his character after his own life is almost lost in the accident and when he has to depend, perhaps for the first time, on everyone else to get the work done. It is then that he sees how lonely his own wife must have been and how negligent of a father he has been at times for Jimmy.

The novel traces several years backwards to an affair that Caroline had engaged in with an ex-boyfriend, though she can’t quite seem to regret it many years later because of the sincerity of the feelings for the man but also because of what her life with Leroy had been. To make matters worse, she had been with the partner one time when a young Annie saw them, and if you really want to do some psychological speculating you could make an argument that her playing witness without full cognition (until her mother admits it much later) has a lot to do with Annie’s indecisive casual affairs with men, going even to the length of involvement with a married man.

All of the characters who are given some point of view have lost a son or brother, Wade, and the grief of that loss is both another aspect of life that all the family members share and some of what led to the sexual carelessness, let’s say, between Leroy and Caroline that produced Jimmy. Whose experience of the family, as the youngest, was different than everyone else’s, and he sure is going to let everyone know how pissed off he is about it.

Michael, we learn, is a lawyer who married Vanessa who grew up in poverty and who has no desire to return to anything that reminds her of that beginning. Michael’s profession serves the story well in that he gets to take on his father’s land squabble with town outsider Bryon Branch in the courtroom, and there is also a beautiful vignette of a couple dogs helping the parents find their injured son who had been out exploring the family’s land before turning an ankle, but even so, I have to say that Michael and Vanessa get lost at points for me during the book, and Vanessa’s movement from the insufferable wife and mother who hates Dodge City and wants to protect her sons from it to someone who’s part of the gang and embracing it all happens a little too quickly and without us seeing enough of the development.

Just because I know the author and enjoyed the book doesn’t mean I should say it was all perfect, but some of The Last Rancher’s incompleteness may be its biggest opportunity. I’ve heard Rebein say that The Last Rancher was in on-and-off idea or production phase for every bit of twenty years. But now, I wonder, with most of the ambitions of his first career in the review mirror and with his own kids now out of the house, could he do with the threads and characters of Dodge City and The Last Rancher what the Kentucky writer Wendell Berry did in building his own fiction around the made-up Kentucky town of Port William? Same characters, but different seasons of life, desires, tragedies, and conflicts.

Jimmy heading off to California? Maybe there’s a novel there. Annie heading back to graduate school with the same affair partner she showed up on the scene determined not to be with and after showcasing her skills as a farm manager to boot? Yeah, I, for one, think she made the wrong choice and want to see how it turns out. What about the cowboy who helped her get it all done, is he really going to disappear from her life? And what about Michael, will he be able to return to his boring, money-making lawyering now that he’s gotten a taste of smaller-time, more meaningful advocacy? Will Caroline ever have the courage to tell Leroy what she once did behind his back? And perhaps most of all, what of the ghost of Wade, so well-evoked throughout the novel’s material and yet always leaving us wanting more, like we got some of the feeling of it but so little of who he actually was and what happened to him?

Lastly, Rebein is classier than I am, and so he almost certainly will not say about his own work that I will say for it: The Last Rancher belongs—is better-written and more interesting than much that comes out of—a bigger press. You shouldn’t have to network your way around New York City to get good work read, but there does seem to be a bit too much of a difference in the taste of gatekeepers to the taste of people from east to west who actually read. If that gap didn’t exist than we probably wouldn’t have a world in which most books don’t sell well (and therefore effectively get subsidized by a few that really hit).¹ The publishing game has been masterful at fetishizing rejection-as-virtue or something, and the craft of writing as a kind of volunteer activity, but the truth is that the world of publishing often possesses many of the same tensions as our national politics.

Maybe a big-press version of The Last Rancher would come out a little differently, as one of the real advantages that famous people who make books have over writers who spend a lifetime trying to write the perfect thing so that a publisher worth its salt will take it is the amount of effort and energy that publishers spend with the former group in and on the process of creating. My point, in other words, is that we invest in making books out of famous people for the purpose of making a few easy bucks rather than putting it into writers who love to write (and who, like Rebein, are often quite good at it).

Even so, let me be clear that there’s enough in the current version of The Last Rancher to get most readers turning the page. That’s what matters. There are stakes and payoffs, and its a joy to read. And it’s for those reasons that I hope Rebein’s latest finds its readership.

1. Griffin’s post isn’t perfect or untouchable, and what it says should be put in conversation with those who criticize it, but we should also pay attention from what place of power and prominence that criticism comes from in relationship to the place from which it came. I suspect it was no accident that the original post struck such a cord, and as they say, where there’s smoke there’s usually fire.