Nisbet Displays Storytelling Mastery

“Purple Flat Top: In Pursuit of a Place” By Jack Nisbet (Sasquatch Books, $12.95, 187 pages)

Word among literary circles is this: memoirs are so hot among the reading public they almost fly off the book store shelves.

That’s good news for Jack Nisbet, whose recently published book, “Purple Flat Top,” is written in the very genre that’s so popular. The bad news: memoir style in the ‘90s is the story of a tragic life (or at least a tragedy) survived and it’s better if there is some element of sex. Nisbet’s book focuses on living and finding a sense of place in the area near Chewelah - it’s short on tragedy and on raw sex.

What’s popular in literary circles, though, should not keep anyone in this area from reading Nisbet’s book. The author’s a master at storytelling, which he really proved in his first book “Sources of the River, Tracking David Thompson Across Western North America.” The highly readable and historically accurate book won the 1995 Washington Governor’s Writers Award and was named Idaho Book of the Year.

With “Purple Flat Top,” Nisbet reached into his young adulthood for material and wrote a book of essays strung together (loosely in some places) by the thread of Nisbet’s search for an area in which he feels at home. It’s the theme of many books on the market right now.

But where some are esoteric meanderings, Nisbet’s is well-grounded in place and time.

Readers will recognize many of the place names in the book and the text will seem richer to those who have skied 49 Degrees North near Chewelah or hiked or golfed in the area because of familiarity with terrain and town.

This strength could prove confusing for those out of the region, however, in that there’s a sense in the writing structure that the reader already knows the place and names and places are tossed out as a fact with, in some cases, not enough context.

But perhaps that’s the point: The pursuit of place (referred to in the subtitle) is the search not the destination. On this measure, Nisbet’s writing style does not fall short.

, DataTimes