The Bartender's Tale

By: Ivan Doig

Narrated by: David Aaron Baker

Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

Audie Award Nominee, Fiction, 2013

Time and again, Ivan Doig has proven himself to be a treasure of American letters. Critical darlings and New York Times best sellers, his novels target the heart of the human experience and never miss the mark.

The Bartender' s Tale stars Tom Harry and his 12-year-old son, Rusty, who live alone and run a bar in a small Montana town in the early 1960s. Their lives are upended when Proxy, a woman from Tom's past, and her beatnik daughter, Francine, breeze into town. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the future, upending every certainty in Rusty’s life and generating a mist of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyone’s vision but his own.

As Rusty struggles to decipher the oddities of adult behavior and the mysteries build toward a reckoning, Ivan Doig wonderfully captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.

©2012 Ivan Doig (P)2012 Recorded Books

Coming of age

What made the experience of listening to The Bartender's Tale the most enjoyable?

This is an excellent coming of age story with some of life's hard knocks. Well written, excellent stortline and very well performed.

Really an enjoyable, feel good book.

If you could sum up The Bartender's Tale in three words, what would they be?

Warmed my heart.

What did you like best about this story?

It was just such a sweet tale that grabbed you from the get go.

Which character – as performed by David Aaron Baker – was your favorite?

Zoey - spunky.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

First, there should be a film made of this book. It would be awesome.
Tag line ... Demand to see the roots.

Good read.

I love the reader. The story was a bit predictable , fun, nice to people no matter their status.

Liked it but it wasn’t a favorite.

It was interesting but not my favorite by this author. Kept expecting more to it.

Engaging tale

Realistic story of father and son in an unconventional life. A little mystery, drama and humor. Can’t ask for more in a book, great narration.

Perfect tale of a father and son

The Bartenders Tale is a wonderful tale, a fictional ode to a father by a son that reads as a memoir. On the face, the son Rusty would have plenty to beef about his bartender father. After all, his father mated with a chambermaid drunk who became Rusty’s mother and she never featured in his life by his father’s wizened choice and some financial sacrifice, and I’ll stop here because we learn her outcome as the story nears its ending. There is also the alleged half-sister, Francine, or full sister as Rusty believes, due to his father Tom Harry’s ill-advised and alcohol-infused interlude with a platinum blonde “taxi dancer” who once worked in a bar he owned in a working town that owed its livelihood to a New Deal dam project. The setting is Montana, and while this story reads like another memorable Montana memoir, “A River Runs Through It,” it is anything but, particularly since Rusty the protagonist hates fishing, and anyway they use spinner reels and use chicken guts for bait. The only poetry in fishing is when the lovable and irrepressible Delano demonstrates his surf casting technique brought from the east coast. Pass this story by at your peril. You will read it through and punch your fist in the air when it ends, that’s how satisfying it is. Excellent narration by David Aaron Baker.

Great Doig

I really enjoyed this listen. Great story (as always from the late, great Doig) and wonderful narration.

Doig is an Artist

This is the second book from Doig that I have read. I only wish my vocabulary was suffieint to paint a mental picture like he does.

This book has a great storyline and, I feel, is reflective of that time people say they wish they could get back to.

Something that seems to be a theme in both of his books that I've read is his portrayal of the men figures of the time. I'm sure this is an outcropping of his real life experiemces with his father.

However, I feel like he writes men as "real men". He shows how they are stern, hard working, and respectible. But he is also able to convey their love and concern for the people around them. I find it refreshing that even in those days where "men were men" Doig doesn't write them as shallow, thin, nothing but work-a-day work people.

The narration on the audio is outstanding and the recording quality is top notch.

Great Writing

Well written, great character development and exceptional narration. This book left me feeling good at the end.

So good

Took me a bit to get hooked, it was a slow beginning. The narrator was perfect, never missed a beat, Just a pleasure to listen to, the story just kept unfolding.