Last Bus To Wisdom: A Novel

Content Warning: The source text includes anti-fat bias as well as outdated and insensitive terminology to refer to Indigenous Americans, people without permanent homes, and people with disabilities. The text also features the theft of Indigenous artifacts by non-Indigenous people.

Among the literary characteristics that pervade Doig’s novels is his use of imagery when describing new settings. Authors, including Doig, frequently employ such imagery when describing a sweeping new vista. For instance, as Donal leaves the Two Medicine area of Montana with which he is familiar, he finds himself riding through a vast, new terrain:

[T]he country along the highway turn to grainfield, miles of green winter wheat striped with the summer fallow of strip farming and tufted here and there with low trees planted around farm buildings as windbreaks. I stay glued to the window, which for a while showed the blue-gray mountains I had been used to all my life, jagged tops white with snow left over from winter (31).

However, the author offers similarly detailed descriptions of more mundane sights, like the people inside of a Wisconsin bar, the dismal Manitowoc skyline, or Herman’s greenhouse constructed from old photographic plates. In the same way Doig introduces the unique qualities of his characters, he takes care to acquaint the reader with the settings that impact those characters as well.