The Mulligan

by: Nathan Jorgenson

Published by: Flat Rock Publishing

Reviewed by Beth Cummings

In golf, a “mulligan” is the term used when you ignore your first shot and start again. That is what Joe Mix, a successful, but unhappy dentist from Rochester, Minnesota, decides he needs to do. His twenty-five-year marriage has drifted into apathy, and every day he dreads going to his office to work on more teeth. Joe feels he has spent his whole life trying to please others and has ended up pleasing no one. So he packs his favorite items in his beat-up old pickup truck, asks his lawyer brother to settle his financial affairs, tells his wife he is through and drives off down I-90 to the west.

His first afternoon of driving took Joe to the southern Minnesota town of Jackson. At a café he meets a woman who had Labrador puppies for sale. As his first action as “new” person, he decided to get a golden lab pup, Jake. Jake becomes his best and sometimes only friend as he drives across South Dakota to his boyhood home of Kadoka. In Kadoka he hoped to find something that would help him figure out who he wanted to be–and where to go from there.

The book covers three distinct parts of Joe’s journey of discovery:

— In the first part the author, Nathan Jorgenson, shows the reader what Joe’s life as a dentist is like and his reasons for leaving that life.

— In the second part, Joe gets a job on a working ranch in eastern Montana and the author gives the reader quite a bit of information about real-life cowboy lives in today’s world.

— The third part of the book covers Joe’s step into the position of fishing guide along the Big Horn River. Again the reader learns quite a bit about fly-fishing, fly tying, and the job of a fishing guide.

This book reminded me of the novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in the way that Joe Mix philosophizes about his own life and the meaning of life. It is a slow book that requires some savoring. It could also have used a bit more editing. Jorgenson has an unfortunate tendency to repeat certain phrases in exactly the same way several times over. These could have been edited without changing the effect of the book.

Armchair Interviews says: Joe does what a lot of people want to: start over.