New West Book Review

West is a Sexy Place in “Best of the West 2009”

Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, foreword by Rick Bass
University of Texas Press, 268 pages, $19.95

Best of the West 2009 is a welcome revival of anthology series that ran from 1988 through 1992, collecting outstanding stories set in “the Wide Side of the Missouri” that previously appeared in literary journals.  Unlike some recent one-off Western story anthologies, such as New Stories from the Southwest (also edited by D. Seth Horton) and Forge Books’ Best Stories of the American West, Volume I, the editors plan to make this an annual publication, and in the 2009 edition, the quality of the stories is just as high as those in the well-known national Best American Short Stories series.

In the foreword, Rick Bass tries to put his finger on “what constitutes a Western short story,” and although he notes, “Is it my imagination, or are there extra teaspoonfuls of loneliness in these stories, extra pinches of desperation?” and “a good many Western short stories tend to possess a kind of intensity or power of the felt physical senses,” he decides, “I’m not convinced there is a Western short story, yet.” Bass doesn’t remark on it, but in this year’s anthology, the overwhelming common theme is sex: the people in these stories might be lonely, but they manage to partner up pretty well.

New West Book Review

Barbara Kingsolver Tackles Epic Themes with “The Lacuna”

The Lacuna
By Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins, 464 pages, $26.99

Barbara Kingsolver worked her way up to becoming one of America’s Current Top Novelists the old-fashioned way, beginning by writing smaller, tightly-focused novels with some autobiographical elements, earning a loyal readership through word-of-mouth and independent bookseller raves in her former home base of the Southwest, then expanding her stories to globe-spanning epics such as her riveting The Poisonwood Bible.  Kingsolver has followed up her recent nonfiction bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family’s quest to eat locally-grown foods for a year, with her first novel in nine years, The Lacuna, a sweeping tale that follows a young man destined to become a popular American novelist in the years before and after he befriends Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky.  The Lacuna is another epic work, setting one man’s story against the grand events of early twentieth century history, and it’s also a bildungsroman and an epistolatory novel, for those AP English students keeping score at home. 

The Lacuna is one of a handful of titles which Amazon and Walmart, in their current book-price war, will sell for nine bucks, along with genre fiction juggernauts including the latest books by John Grisham and James Patterson.  Kingsolver’s novel is an ironic pick, because leftist politics are at its heart and its protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, is a reclusive, mostly-celibate gay man who writes about Aztec and Mayan history, elements which would not normally cause the books that house them to fly off the shelves.  But The Lacuna will please Kingsolver’s plentiful fans because it is full of the qualities that her books have always contained—striking, precise detail, human passion, vivid language, snappy dialogue, and a singularly fascinating character in Kingsolver’s imagining of Frida Kahlo.

New West Book Review

Kent Meyers’ “Twisted Tree” Haunts, Paints Picture of Small Town Tragedy

Twisted Tree
by Kent Meyers
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 289 pages, $24

Kent Meyers’ haunting new novel, Twisted Tree, opens with an invented quote from a police officer speaking in a 2003 article in the fictional Spokane Plain Dealer, entitled “Is There an I-90 Killer?”: “We believe it’s the same man.  Both victims were female, extremely thin.” On the next page Meyers begins his complicated narrative with the first-person voice of a serial killer, a man who targets anorexic women along I-90, kidnaps, rapes, and kills them, and breaks their bones, although as one character chillingly observes, nobody knows in exactly what order he carries out those vile acts.  He researches his victims on pro-anorexia sites on the Internet, and as Twisted Tree opens, he discovers his target, Hayley Jo Zimmerman, or HayJay, at the store where he knows she works in the Rushmore Mall in Rapid City, South Dakota, and entices her into leaving with him.

Meyers brings the chapter to the moment where Hayley Jo realizes what her fate will be, then he leaves her, plunging the reader into the thoughts of the supermarket checkout clerk in Hayley Jo’s hometown of Twisted Tree, South Dakota.  The clerk, Elise Thompson, spent some time as a missionary in South America, and vaguely knew Hayley Jo, as did everyone in this small town.  The book carries on like this, jumping from one character’s first-person narrative or third-person perspective to the next, moving back and forth in time, offering up many sharp, moving passages, such as the story of a poor Native American boy’s brief triumph as an elementary school marble champion.  In this way Meyers fashions a portrait of the town, filled with the large and small tragedies, the frustrated hopes and the minor triumphs of its people.  Meyers brilliantly displays the abuse, the secret loves, and private dreams that form the hidden motivations of this community.

New West Book Review

David Mas Masumoto Pays the Price for Perfect Peaches

Wisdom of the Last Farmer
by David Mas Masumoto
Simon & Schuster, 238 pages, $25

David Mas Masumoto‘s Wisdom of the Last Farmer will make you want to go out and pay a farmer more than the asking price for his produce at a market.  Masumoto grows organic peaches, nectarines, and grapes on his farm in California’s central valley, carrying on in the tradition of his family.  His grandparents emigrated from Japan over a hundred years ago with the dream of buying land.  Because they weren’t native born Americans, laws forbade them from purchasing land, so instead they worked in other people’s fields and suffered through internment in the Arizona desert during World War II.  But they persevered and eventually their sons established the 80-acre farm that Masumoto now runs with his wife and children. 

Masumoto is on a mission to preserve flavorful heirloom peaches that his family has grown for decades, varieties most farmers have abandoned because of supermarkets’ demands for harder, redder peaches with longer shelf life and transport durability.  Masumoto wants people to experience the “Sun Crest peach, a fat and juicy gem with a stunning, honeyed flavor.” If people could try it, he thinks, they probably wouldn’t settle for the fruit that’s sold as peaches today.

In Wisdom of the Last Farmer, Masumoto, a columnist for the Fresno Bee and the award-winning author of several previous books, discusses his father’s decline in the wake of a stroke, and how their hard work in pursuit of a perfect peach breaks their bodies and spirits down.  “Organic farming is not simple or easy,” Masumoto writes.  “It’s easy to want to be environmentally responsible, but it’s a damned hard thing to achieve.  I cannot replace tedious labor with faster technology or equipment when things go wrong.”

David Mas Masumoto will be in Utah to present his book in Salt Lake City at the King’s English Bookshop on Thursday, October 22 (5:30 p.m.).  On October 23 and 24, he will participate in the Moab Confluence “Eating the West” literary festival, and on October 25 he will visit Denver’s Tattered Cover (Colfax, 2 p.m.) as a part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library reading series.

New West Book Review

Irene Vilar’s “Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict”

Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict
by Irene Vilar
Other Press
222 pages, $15.95

Irene Vilar was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.  Her first memoir, The Ladies’ Gallery, was a Philadelphia Inquirer and Detroit Free Press notable book of the year and was short-listed for the 1999 Mind Book of the Year Award.  She is a literary agent and series editor of The Americas at Texas Tech University Press, and lives in Colorado with her husband and two daughters.  Despite all these achievements, Irene Vilar also had fifteen abortions in sixteen years and tried to commit suicide seven times.  And no, her latest book, Impossible Motherhood, is not fiction.

Looking at the cover it’s easy to assume Impossible Motherhood is a sensationalist book.  The “abortion addict” subtitle sounds like a strange marketing ploy, but Vilar shows that she was an abortion addict, similar to how her brothers were heroin addicts and her father an alcoholic womanizer.  During her second abortion/suicide attempt, she almost bled to death.  One of her last abortions was an illegal one in Puerto Rico inside a warehouse-like room.  Vilar was at risk for cervical cancer and still had fecal matter from one of her pregnancies lodged inside her body. 

But Impossible Motherhood isn’t really about her abortions.  It’s about a destructive family legacy, self-mutilation, and, eventually, survival.  Surprisingly, it reads easily and is a gripping book.  Throughout I kept forgetting how many abortions Vilar had and kept hoping she would stop and save herself.  In lesser hands this could have been an overwrought book, but Vilar doesn’t sensationalize, or make excuses.  Most readers will be able to relate to the universal themes of trauma, depression, grief, loss and self-destruction.

Irene Vilar will discuss her book at the Boulder Book Store on Monday, October 19 at 7:30 p.m.

New West Book Review

Laughing on the Way to Bankruptcy: Jess Walter’s “Financial Lives of the Poets”

The Financial Lives of the Poets
by Jess Walter
Harper, 290 pages, $25.99

In his hilarious and timely new novel, Spokane’s Jess Walter explores the maxim that there’s nothing more dangerous than an unemployed man, even though the primary person in danger may be the man himself, as is the case with protagonist Matt Prior.  Several years before The Financial Lives of the Poets begins, Matt was a business reporter for a daily newspaper and he decided to pursue his ill-conceived dream: starting a website that reports business news in poetry form.  When Poetfolio.com tanked before it was even launched, something that everyone but Matt could see coming, Matt scurried back to his newspaper job.  But because he’d left, he lost his seniority at the paper, and was one of the first to be laid off when the paper downsized.

Matt couldn’t afford to lose his job: he’s got an enormous mortgage on a big house, a car payment, a garage full of supposedly collectible crap that his wife purchased in a compulsive shopping binge on eBay, and two non-Catholic young sons who attend Catholic school because the neighborhood public school reminds Matt of Sing-Sing.  One evening when Matt has just received a letter from the mortgage company threatening foreclosure in a week, he is becoming increasingly suspicious of his wife’s Facebook conversations with her old high school boyfriend, and his unemployment benefits are about to run out, Matt heads to a 7-Eleven to buy some milk.  “Two tattooed white kids in silk sweat suits step to the line behind me and I tense a little, double-pat my wallet,” Walter writes.  As Matt walks outside, one of the guys offers him “a hit on a glass blunt.”

Jess Walter will discuss The Financial Lives of the Poets at Powells Books in Portland, Ore. on October 29, in Missoula at Fact and Fiction on November 5, and at the University Bookstore in Moscow, Idaho on December 3.

New West Book Review

Mike Roselle Details Years of Environmental Activism in “Tree Spiker”

Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action
by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan
St. Martin’s Press
252 pages, $24.99

Mike Roselle is a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, and the Ruckus Society.  Tree Spiker details his life as an environmental activist and outsider agitator.  In his acknowledgments, Roselle notes that this book doesn’t completely cover the movement or even his memories, but that we should think of it as “a series of campfire tales and late-night bar talk.” And that’s exactly how it reads: like sitting next to a great storyteller and hearing his fascinating experiences.

Anyone living in the West, or anyone even remotely interested in the environment or environmental groups, should read Tree Spiker.  When I looked at the gothic-like cover with spooky trees and horror writing yellow font, I wasn’t sure how much I would like it.  In college I read Edward Abbey’s books and found Hayduke’s slovenly sexism and tossing aluminum cans out car windows unattractive, and I figured Roselle would be more of the same.  But then I read he spent part of his childhood in Butler County, Kentucky, where a billboard with a picture of three hooded Klansmen burning a cross welcomed people to Klan country.  That intrigued me, but Roselle hooked me with:

“I heard a rumor that my father, Stewart Lee, was in town.  I hadn’t seen him since my step-grandfather chased him out of our house with a pistol he kept for that purpose.  The last time I saw him, he was running down South Eighth Street toward the bars on Magnolia Street.”

Mike Roselle will read from Tree Spiker at Back of Beyond Books in Moab on October 15th (7 p.m.), in Jackson at Valley Book Store on October 20 (5 p.m.), in Missoula at Fact & Fiction on Tuesday, October 27 (3 p.m.) and at a fundraiser at The Badlander (7 p.m.), and in Portland at Julia’s Cafe on October 30 (7 p.m.).

New West Book Review

War Hits Home in Phil Condon’s “Nine Ten Again”

Nine Ten Again
by Phil Condon
Elixir Press, 186 pages, $17

Looking out the window each day at peaceful American streets, it’s difficult for many of us to tell that our country is at war.  But the characters in Missoula writer Phil Condon’s sharply-written new story collection, Nine Ten Again, are all too aware of the far-away wars that the U.S. has participated in over the past few decades, which have affected them in ways both tangible and intangible.  Yellow ribbons appear throughout the book not as symbols of hope but as symptoms of malignancy, signs of the wars that rob people of their lives, mental health, self-respect, and peace of mind.

Most of Condon’s characters work blue-collar jobs, and so they are not as insulated from war as are those with more money.  They are veterans too scarred by their service to hold down a job, or people desperate enough for money to contemplate signing up for a hitch as contractors in the Middle East.  As a character in the title story says, “She ain’t ever gonna be 9-10 again, boys.”

Phil Condon will read from his new book at Fact & Fiction in Missoula on Friday, September 25 (7 p.m.).

New West Book Review

White-Water Drama: Elisabeth Hyde’s “In the Heart of the Canyon”

In the Heart of the Canyon
By Elisabeth Hyde
Knopf, 336 pages, $22.95

In her latest novel, In the Heart of the Canyon, Colorado-based writer Elisabeth Hyde (The Abortionist’s Daughter) churns out an adventurous narrative that rumbles along like a white-water rapid.  In it, fifteen different people pile into three rubber rafts to run the biggest, most bad-ass river of their lives: the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River.  And for the next thirteen days, their fates are intertwined as they navigate this remote landscape and confront the rocky confines of their personal lives along the way. 

Expert river guide JT Maroney might have shown up at Lee’s Ferry with some idea of what to expect from the days that would follow.  This is his 125th trip through the Grand Canyon, and even though some elements of the journey remain the same each time, he can’t predict the particular quirks that will show up along with his guests who arrive on Day One, with “their skin pale and freshly shaved and smelling of sunscreen.”