“No Happier State” by Will Tinkham

In no way would it be an exaggeration to say that Will Tinkham is one of my all-time favourite authors. Once I open his book, I can’t stop reading. His skill to weave ordinary people’s lives into the canvas of big history is unparalleled. By doing this, Will Tinkham highlights what we often forget. Every life, no matter how insignificant it seems when viewing it separately, gains meaning in the global picture.

Pêche Appleton might not be important. Yet, her life is fascinating to follow. As are the lives of her friends she shares happy, sad, and tragic moments with.

Pêche sells figurines of ‘important men’ – she calls them sculps – using a site of national significance for her marketing purposes. As it happens, Pêche lives in Keystone, South Dakota, where, all through the years of the Great Depression, Mount Rushmore National Memorial is being built to commemorate the memory of the greatest presidents of America. At the times of the Great Depression and then the years of World War II, Pêche is doing better than most. True, not because her sculp-selling business is striving. Pêche dabbles in prospecting for gold. And that allows her a little more freedom, which she shamelessly uses depicting great American men in all sorts of compromising positions. Jefferson-and-the-Slave-Girl series isn’t a hit with every tourist who shuffles to her makeshift display counter at the foot of what would soon be a ‘Shrine of Democracy.’

Pêche’s husband Ernie is good at quite a few things. He is a local baseball star, he has a remarkable memory for selected historical dates, and he is capable of loving the girl he met when they both were twelve until his last breath.

Steinke – originally Steinkeller but turned ‘Stinky’ due to an Ellis Island registration worker’s misplaced humour – is a rare man who gets through the Depression times without losing his job. And all because he ‘got the goods on Gutzon.’ Yes, that very same Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who created the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Steinke’s lucky streak ends, though, when the Japanese drop bombs at Pearl Harbour and American citizens with certain origins are announced to be enemy aliens and sent to internment camps. It doesn’t help him that he is the son of a German father and a Jewish mother.

Then, there is Bad Glove Hand, a Lakota Sioux who, seeing the place sacred for his people defaced by a ‘white man’, chooses to try his luck in Hollywood. I’m afraid, after reading this book I won’t be able to call a certain American president other than ‘Rawhide’ and, Mr. Tinkham, this is solely your fault!

“No Happier State” by Will Tinkham is about many things, big and small, important for whole nations and every person individually. I could probably write a whole book about this incredible novel, but reading the original will bring you incomparably more literary enjoyment.