The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All

The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All  by Josh Ritter 304 pages

The protagonist of songwriter Josh Ritter’s second novel is ninety-nine-year-old Weldon Applegate, lying on his deathbed in a hospital. Tubes are coming out of his arms, and he is on oxygen. He seems to this reader to be passing in and out of consciousness.

When he is out of it, Weldon returns to the forests of Cordelia, Idaho, almost a century earlier; back to a time when he was a child and the Applegates were considered the best lumberjacks in the industry. When his head is clear, he recounts a life of murder, mayhem, avalanches, bootlegging and all sorts of axe-swinging adventures.

Weldon’s father, Tom, was a lumberjack who promised his wife that he'd stay safe and never jack again. After his wife dies, he and Weldon move to Cordelia, a town full of lumberjacks and near the Lost Lot, a cursed tract of land that Tom owns. Tom works in the town general store but finds himself making a deal with a larger-than-life lumberjack-of-legend, Linden Laughlin, who turns out to be a devil in disguise. Weldon tells us the whole story in tall-tale style from those times through when technology and industry take over.

The story structure follows Weldon’s mental state, moving from one adventure to another without any division. I found this hard to follow. The language is rough, but realistic for the time period. It didn’t bother me, but I just didn’t like the story. For me, the action moved a snail’s pace, but I think it was me and not the story. I wasn’t as drawn in as I had hoped to be, but I will admit to learning a lot about lumberjacking. Therefore, “The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All” receives 2 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.