Hero's journey

The hero takes a journey in Ivan Doig's ceaselessly entertaining 2015 novel Last Bus to Wisdom, although that hero is just "eleven going on twelve." He is an orphan named Donal Cameron, who goes by several other names as well during the course of his journey, mostly by Greyhound. Making up stories, as well as names, proves to be Donny's best talent, suggesting that in him, to use another cliche of minor-league literary analysis, we have an unreliable narrator, to say the least.

He is being raised by his grandmother, a cook at a Montana ranch, but when she needs surgery and expects a summer-long recovery, she sends him by bus to her only relative, a sister in Wisconsin with who she has never gotten along.

We soon discover why the sisters aren't close. Despite a physical resemblance to Kate Smith -- this is 1951, when even an 11-year-old boy would know what Kate Smith looks like -- Aunt Kate is a miserly, argumentative woman. Every morning Donny wakes up hearing her and Herman, the man he assumes to be her husband, arguing over the way he eats his toast. When she catches Donny stealing money, which he insists is rightfully his since his own money disappeared soon after his arrival and he was not rewarded for helping her win at cards, she puts him on a bus back home, likely to end up in foster care.

But who should show up in the seat next to him but Herman, a retired Great Lakes sailor and an illegal German immigrant who has just been living with Kate. He is a big fan of Karl May's novels about the Wild West, and he wants to see the real West with Donny.

And so begins an adventure that takes them from a rodeo to Yellowstone to a ranch owned by Rags Rasmussen, the greatest rodeo cowboy of them all.

This 450-page novel is chockfull of colorful  characters, most of whom sign the autograph book Donny takes with him. By summer's end Donny faces a terrible dilemma: return to his now-recovered grandmother, whom he has been deceiving all these weeks, or remain with Herman and Rags on the ranch he has come to love. Doig gives us a resolution, but not until the very last delicious sentence.