Sundown, Yellow Moon.

Watson, Larry (author).

Watson’s novels share an elegiac tone. His melancholy narrators speak softly and sadly about the obsessions that have dominated their lives. So it is in this story of an unnamed writer whose entire career has been aimed at making sense of a tragedy that occurred in North Dakota in 1961. On that day, the father of the narrator’s best friend shot a state senator and killed himself. Naturally, the question of why it happened becomes the talk of middle-class Bismarck, but it is much more than that for our narrator and his father, who discovered the body. Watson mixes the narrator’s reflections on the tragedy and its effect on his later life with snippets from his short fiction, which offer various explanations for what happened. As we read, however, we realize that the real tragedy is not what happened then but what is happening now—to the narrator and to the lives he touches. The problem here is that the narrator’s obsession is not the reader’s, and eventually we tire of his theories. But that’s the point in this oddly heartbreaking story: allowed to run amok, the past becomes a monster capable of devouring the present.