LONGER REVIEW: Whiskey Rebel

Dunn’s comedic novel features a wounded veteran and an itinerant dreamer.

Punxie Tawney is out on his own in the wilds of Washington state, panning for gold in much the same way the prospectors of yesteryear would have. Punxie is freshly back from a tour of duty in Iraq, and though he is up and about, readers quickly learn his tour ended when he was critically injured by a roadside IED while riding in an Army Humvee. Though Punxie might say his faculties are intact, he seems, if not psychologically bereft, to be searching for something or someone. This longing is no doubt exacerbated by the fact that while Punxie was away at war, both his mother and father died in rapid succession, leaving him an orphan. From across the shores of the river where he combs for precious ore, Punxie notices the also memorably named Hamilton Chance, another man ostensibly panning for gold who, Punxie soon learns, is driven by another goal. Hamilton, as he explains to Punxie, is descended from a long line of American patriots, most notably the men who led the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Using that rebellion as a call to action, Hamilton’s sole purpose at this stage in his life is to establish a distillery in which he will make tax-free, all-American whiskey (the name of which, the men decide later on, will be “Westcoulatum Good Goddamned 1794 Freedom Whiskey”). Punxie, with little family or obligation tethering him to any one place, soon sets off with Hamilton, and the two of them “go fishing,” using their thumbs as “lures” to hitch a ride to the local library where Hamilton can teach Punxie about his family history. Punxie, perhaps somewhat conveniently, is taken quite quickly with the idea of Hamilton’s distillery and the notion of pure freedom it promises. Things are never so simple, though. When “The Aphrodite of Wenatchee,” otherwise known as Cherry, shows up with her friend Loyalhanna in tow, Punxie’s latent loneliness and desperation for contact—the same things that initially attached him to Hamilton—make it impossible for him to shun human connection, even if it gets in the way of 1794 Freedom Whiskey.

While Dunn’s novel is mostly humorous and generally lighthearted, his prose occasionally rises to the poetic, particularly when describing the landscape: “The sun was beginning to get tired of sterilizing Moses Coulee and was letting gravity pull it toward the Cascades. Soon, it would take its evening dip into the Pacific to cool off for the night, and then Moses Coulee would become a different thing altogether.” Such writing is reminiscent of Dunn’s other work, and fans of his novel Radio Free Olympia (2023) will delight in this return to form. This novel arrives at an interesting time in the American cultural climate; while some readers may have a hard time finding the levity in any discussion of “freedom” or American history, Dunn writes with enough heart and a sufficiently deft hand to wrangle the material with class and self-awareness.

A fun romp through the modern American West buttressed by earnest humor and a dash of history.