Partial Review of Rat Tail Curves by James Ostby

Rat Tail Curves by James Ostby
I came to Rat Tail Curves after being tipped off by a member of the Robert Pirsig Association, who mentioned that James Ostby had studied under Pirsig himself. That connection immediately caught my attention — not just because Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance remains such a touchstone for American philosophical fiction, but because Ostby’s work promised something rare: an insider’s intellectual critique of small-town plains culture, filtered through the dry wind and long silences of northeastern Montana.  
Even from the opening pages, Ostby’s prose is confident, clear, and quietly beautiful. The writing carries a kind of spare precision — vivid but never sentimental. We meet Harald, the book’s philosophical everyman, observing a snow-glittered prairie where “the sun was brilliant but somewhat obscured behind a haze of ice crystals.” It’s a perfect image of Ostby’s own aesthetic: cold, sharp, luminous, and a little remote. Like Pirsig, he finds transcendence in detail — the sound of pheasant wings, an ink-stained desk, the melancholy of rusting machinery and pink winter skies.
Philosophically, Ostby seems to stand at the edge between humanism and despair. He laments that philosophy and religion have merged into dogma, that no truly new thinkers have emerged, and that knowledge itself may have reached a kind of epistemological plateau — what he hints might be an “end of knowing.” He quotes Hitchens: “We know less and less about more and more.” There’s pity for the masses, but not disdain — only the insistence that thought and responsibility must be joined if life is to retain dignity.
The Montana landscape becomes a metaphor for that condition: stark beauty bordering on futility. Harald’s musings on change (“most change is bad”) and his sense of time’s resistance evoke the loneliness of someone too self-aware for his surroundings. His father Sexton, a realist and formally heavy drinker, offers little comfort. When Harald finally asks him the meaning of life, the answer is silence — not cynicism, but exhaustion. That exchange, in its simplicity, captures Ostby’s tone: unsparing yet deeply human.
Ostby weaves in thinkers like Herbert Spencer, Josiah Royce (who combines Berkeley’s divine perceiver with Hegel’s self-unfolding Spirit), and Erasmus, creating a moral and metaphysical crosswind between scientific evolution, idealism, and existential yearning. His mention of Royce’s belief that “all reality is unified in a single consciousness” echoes Pirsig’s own idea of value as the organizing principle of experience. Like Pirsig, Ostby is trying to locate meaning after the collapse of inherited frameworks — religion, science, and small-town certainties alike.
Ostby’s broader philosophy is hard to pin down, but the tone and trajectory of Rat Tail Curves, along with hints from his other writings, suggest a reflective humanism shaped by doubt and restraint. He seems skeptical of dogma yet still drawn to meaning — a thinker caught between metaphysical curiosity and the quiet despair of modern intellect, searching for coherence in a world grown indifferent to wisdom
Thematically, the book’s first third feels like a meditation on what happens when the search for purpose outlives the myths that once sustained it. Harald doesn’t reject faith so much as find it hollow, yet he recognizes that disbelief offers no better ground. He is, as Ostby describes, a “philosophical plodder” — and that phrase feels deliberate. The novel moves with the pace of his trudging across the frozen fields: slow, reflective, weighted with the ache of distance.
If Rat Tail Curves continues as powerfully as its opening chapters, it stands as both a personal and cultural elegy — a meditation on the American plains mind, its loneliness, its flashes of wonder, and its inability to stop asking why. Having read excerpts from some of Ostby’s earlier work, this later novel feels more polished, mature, and assured.
For readers drawn to the quiet moral landscapes of Pirsig, Steinbeck, or Kent Haruf, Rat Tail Curves is worth seeking out. It’s not only a story about a man and his father, but a philosophical field journal of the high plains — where the wind, the whiskey, and the silence all conspire to make thinking itself an act of survival. Pointing to the many who up and left Ostby/Harald is the voice of a thinker who stayed behind to think about what it all meant.