Props to author Edward Lee for trying to concoct an unconventional tale in The Good Man (Bridge Works, 2005), his debut novel about a Korean War vet who returns to the Montana sheep ranch of his youth.

Montana is an unlikely setting to explore Korea’s historical trauma — in this case, the No Gun Ri incident, which made headlines several years ago when it was discovered that American soldiers killed hundreds of Korean civilians retreating south during the Korean War — and the cast of characters is just as incongruous. First, there is Gabe, an aging drifter with only one good eye, a Bible and a bottle of whisky in his backpack, who returns to his stark, beautiful mountain valley home after a 40-year absence. There, he is reunited with a Korean peasant girl whom he rescued at No Gun Ri and brought home after the war. The Korean girl, now a woman in her mid-50s, has been running the sheep ranch and waiting for him to return all this time. Gabe also discovers that the woman has a daughter named Yahng Yi, a stubborn, free-willed teenager itching to run away from home and wander about to destinations unknown. From the very start, the premise seems intriguing. Korean immigrants working on a Montana sheep ranch? Well, what the heck. Let’s see where this goes.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BRIDGE WORKS PUBLISHING

And indeed, there are certain aspects of this first novel that are praiseworthy (including the unconventional setting). Lee has a very nice poetic touch, and his wonderfully tactile descriptions are beautiful at times. Given the quality of some of these excellent descriptive passages, I wondered what might have happened had Lee, a published poet, decided to write a poem instead of a novel on this topic.

However, there are some problems with the book. Stylistically, The Good Man seems to be in the same vein as Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, a haunting, desolate novel about life in a small town on the Colorado plains that was a National Book Award finalist in 2000. Lee seems to aim for the same stark beauty of Haruf’s post-Hemingway, minimalist, stream-of-consciousness style, but unfortunately, misses. And badly.

Endless descriptions of mountain valleys, animal husbandry (a number of graphic scenes about sheep giving birth), local cowherds who mosey about grunting terse phrases that begin with “Ain’t” — Lee writes as if we were in a Western set 100 years ago. Aside from references to the Korean War, a bottle of Yoohoo and one of the locals getting gas for his truck, there’s hardly anything else to alert the reader that this story takes place in the early 1990s.

Most disappointing, Lee’s characters are overwhelmingly two-dimensional caricatures. Gabe, outfitted with a black patch, has Clint Eastwood’s “High Plains Drifter” persona — the kind of cowboy who squints his eyes, gazes out at the vast, dusky plain and says words of wisdom like, “Looks like rain, I reckon.” Endowing memory loss (from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head) to Gabe’s already taciturn nature only compounds the reader’s frustration with this catatonic character. The Korean mother, an immigrant of 40 years, is also a shaman who waxes on (and off) about palcha, or fate, and speaks in ridiculously formal, yet broken, “Oriental” English: “You laugh at me. I speak with too much familiarity. I forget it has been so long.” Once again, we’re back to Yoda-slash-Tonto-speak — clipped, stoic phrases with the syntax just slightly out of whack to convey “deep wisdom,” which is funny given that the other characters speak as though they perpetually have a deep wad of snuff lodged in their lower lips.