New West Book Review

Memoir of a Climbing Widow: Jennifer Lowe-Anker’s “Forget Me Not”

Forget Me Not
by Jennifer Lowe-Anker
Mountaineers Books, 256 pages, $24.95

In Forget Me Not, Jennifer Lowe-Anker chronicles life with her first husband Alex Lowe, who was thought by many to be the world’s best mountain climber before he was lost in an avalanche in the Tibetan Himalayas in 1999. Her memoir, comprehensive and faithful, does his life of achievement great justice, and is surprisingly upbeat even as she attempts to answer some of the darker questions associated with his vocation. As she examines Alex’s childhood as well as their courtship—when his profession as a mountain climber first took shape—she wonders how Alex became such an intense leader and climber, risking his life again and again, and, in his case, even with a family waiting at home.

At the beginning of the book, Lowe-Anker writes of Alex’s heart, that it was “frequently and most definitely in conflict with itself.” And at the end of the book, Lowe-Anker states that the writing of this memoir has been cathartic. Though her main aim is to memorialize the grandness of Alex’s success and scope, she also ends up describing the troubling fact that she was often left alone to raise three boys. She grapples with why she was attracted to such a life in the first place, and then why she was so understanding—so much so that Alex himself dubbed her “Saint Jennifer.”

New West Book Review

Multi-Cultural in the Monochromatic West: A Novel For a Contemporary Denver

Children of the Waters
by Carleen Brice
One World/Ballantine, 304 pages, $14

Denver novelist Carleen Brice's second novel is a quick-paced family drama that turns on a secret adoption, told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of two sisters who are unknown to each other, living in the same city but in very different worlds. Trish Taylor is a blond, overweight veterinary technician who came back to her hometown of Aurora, Colo. after her marriage failed, bringing her biracial teenage son Will with her. Trish was told her mother and infant sister died in a car accident when she was a preschooler, and her stern grandparents raised her. Billie Cousins is the cherished daughter of a successful Denver African-American family. Her mother is a Reynelda Muse-like local television anchor, and her father is the dean of the business school at the University of Colorado. Through a newly discovered letter and a visit to an old neighbor, Trish learns that Billie is the sister she thought died in infancy, and tracks her down, disrupting both their lives.

Carleen Brice will discuss her new book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on July 16 at 7:30 p.m.

New West Book Review

Disappearing Act: Candida Lawrence’s “Vanishing”

Vanishing
by Candida Lawrence
275 pages, $23.95

Candida Lawrence's new Vanishing is a collection of incisive, chronologically arranged personal essays that plunge the reader into vivid moments of her past, beginning in 1942 when Candida is in college at Berkeley and is a reporter for the Daily Cal, and extending into recent times, when she is coping with aging and adjusting to a changed world. Like Mary Gordon, Lawrence writes with great candor, wit, and intelligence about her family. Lawrence lives in Mill Valley, California, and is the author of three previous memoirs. As she reveals in one of the most arresting pieces in the book, "Vanishing: 1965," Lawrence spent years hiding out under an assumed identity after she took off with her children in the wake of a messy divorce which had left her with very limited visitation rights. This is perhaps why, as revelatory as these essays are, they still bear an air of mystery.

Lawrence writes bracing prose, mainly in present tense, replete with precise detail; the effect of this approach is that the reader feels as though sitting right beside her in 1965 when she flies to San Diego with $500 for an abortion in Mexico. "We rent a 1965 Ford Sedan, blue with a white interior, AM-FM radio, and a clock that works," she writes. "I sit primly on the dazzling vinyl and feel small." In Tijuana, they wait in a parking lot for a station wagon that comes to take women to a clinic. Lawrence's descriptions of the people with her on that ride provide a cross section of women in the same situation:

"To my right is Black Woman, calm, dignified. Next to Black Woman is a young girl…dressed in faded jeans…Her eyes are red from recent weeping and seem about to spill over again. Facing Young Girl on the bench opposite, is an older woman in a light-blue pants suit…I would have guessed her to be too old for this trip, but perhaps she has similar thoughts about me."

New West Book Review

Birdman: Rachel Dickinson’s “Falconer on the Edge”

Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West
by Rachel Dickinson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 220 pages, $24

In Falconer on the Edge, Rachel Dickinson gives readers an in-depth look at a subculture that many people may not be aware existed. Falconers are an intense, passionate, tight-knit group of bird-loving hunters, and they subdivide themselves according to the type of bird they fly, from those who favor hunting sage grouse with gyrfalcon-peregrine hybrids ("an überbird [with] stamina and speed and beauty") to those who fly hawks to catch squirrels and jackrabbits. The falconers Dickinson depicts remind me of a more athletic and outdoorsy version of Trekkies, with their conventions, cliques, private jargon derived from Norman French, and the way they are often misunderstood by outsiders.

Although falconry ("a loose term [that] refers to flying any kind of raptor or bird of prey") originated perhaps 3,500 years ago in the Middle East, spread through Asia and Europe, and didn't catch on in North America until the twentieth century, it seems a pastime tailor-made for the American West, as it requires a lot of open space and abundant game. With all the care and training that a bird of prey demands, not to mention the need for the falconer to be in top condition to run through fields after his bird, it might be the most labor and time-intensive variety of hunting, which is why so few practice it. Dickinson writes, "Today there are approximately forty-five hundred licensed falconers in the United States, and two to three thousand of them belong to [the North American Falconers Association]." Judging from the portraits in Dickinson's book, there are no casual falconers.

New West Book Review

Lisa Jones’ “Broken: A Love Story”

Broken: A Love Story
by Lisa Jones
Scribner, 275 pages, $25

Colorado writer Lisa Jones was a freelance journalist on assignment for Smithsonian magazine when she first met Stanford Addison, a charismatic horse trainer on the Wind River Arapaho reservation near Lander, Wyoming. Addison doesn't match the typical image of a horse trainer: he is a quadriplegic who has been confined to a wheelchair for over twenty years following a car accident. Addison "gentles" horses rather than breaks them, offering instructions from outside the corral, and even working with the horses himself. And Addison is also an Arapaho healer, hosting regular sweat lodges, praying for those who ask it of him, and communicating with spirits, good and bad.

Jones began her friendship with Addison as a skeptic about the spirit world, but she never doubted his healing powers.
Spiritually adrift in mid-life, she returned frequently to the Addison ranch, where Addison served as the center of a complicated family. In Broken: A Love Story, Jones tells the remarkable tale of Stan Addison's life and work, investing it with detail that brings his world to vivid life for the reader. Through Jones' hard-earned understanding of one Northern Arapaho family, the reader is given an inside glimpse into this culture. Despite their poverty, they lavish love on one another, others taking care of children when a parent dies or leaves, and pulling together in difficult times, which are heartbreakingly frequent.

Lisa Jones will appear at the Center for The Arts in Jackson, Wyoming, on June 12 at 7 p.m.

New West Book Review

Mountain Moguls: Mark T. Sullivan’s “Triple Cross”

Triple Cross
by Mark T. Sullivan
St. Martin's Press, 390 pages, $24.95

Montana-based writer Mark T. Sullivan concocts a chilling recipe for disaster in his new thriller, Triple Cross. The ingredients of this too-plausible plot will be familiar: action sports, terrorism, and the Internet. But these elements come together in a way that will leave readers hoping Sullivan’s imagined scenario never comes true.

Triple Cross opens on a snowy New Year’s Eve at the Jefferson Club, a remote mountain resort for the ultra rich. Around 150 guests are gathered in the club’s colossal lodge to greet the New Year. Some of the world’s most powerful people are hobnobbing in tuxedos and holiday gowns when a greed-busting terrorist group calling themselves the Third Position Army crashes the party.

New West Book Review

Busted Candy: Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move”

Nobody Move
by Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 196 pages, $23

Northern Idaho-based novelist Denis Johnson has followed up his sprawling, National-Book Award winning Tree of Smoke with Nobody Move, a quick book he's described as "cheap pulp fiction." Playboy serialized the novel last year, and it's a wild, bullet-riddled ride that begins, oddly enough, as Jimmy Luntz takes the stage with the Alhambra California Beachcomber Chordsmen, a barbershop chorus entered in a competition in which they finish seventeenth out of twenty. But Johnson leaves this intriguing world behind the moment after he presents it, as the book moves relentlessly forward, chasing the trouble that Luntz gets into over a gambling debt to a smalltime Bakersfield gangster named Juarez.

As he leaves the competition, dressed in a "blinding white tux," Luntz encounters Gambol, "A tall, sad man in expensive slacks and shoes, camel-hair sports coat, one of those white straw hats that senior-citizen golfers wear." Juarez has sent Gambol to collect Luntz, who has fallen behind on his payments. Johnson jumps ahead then to the moment after Luntz has shot Gambol in the leg and is calling an ambulance. "Am I supposed to sit around and wait for you to break my arm?" he says to the bleeding Gambol. Luntz has never shot anybody before, and his lack of nerve in failing to finish Gambol off has dire repercussions. He takes off with Gambol's fat wallet in his Cadillac, while Gambol crawls away to hide himself from the police. Gambol calls Juarez, who says he knows a vet who might be able to doctor him.

New West Book Review

Into the Woods: Ron Carlson’s “The Signal”

The Signal
By Ron Carlson
Viking, 184 pages, $25.95

Ron Carlson's new The Signal is a taut and suspenseful novel written with beauty and precision, centered around a camping trip in Wyoming's Wind River Range. For ten years, Mack and his wife Vonnie have gone hiking in that area every September, but this year is starkly different. Since the last trip, Mack has been "running in low-rent behavior for almost a year, scrambling for money, crossing the line when it worked for him, drinking too much because it didn't matter and the company he kept drank."

In the face of his financial troubles, with his ranch in danger of foreclosure, Mack got involved with some meth runners. Vonnie left Mack when his behavior became unacceptable and probably divorced him, though he doesn't know that for certain, as he never opened the letters from her lawyer, "golden envelopes with return addresses pretty as wedding invitations." Mack recently finished a stint in jail for busting the windshield of Vonnie's new beau's fancy vehicle. Feeling sorry for Mack, Vonnie agreed to complete their annual camping trip one last time.

This backstory is delivered cleverly amid the present action of the six-day camping trip. The caustic barbs in the dialogue between Mack and Vonnie reveal their complicated past. ("Somebody's been to REI," the perpetually broke Mack comments when Vonnie brings out a new pair of binoculars.) Mystery drives the first part of the book, as Carlson metes out the details of Mack and Vonnie's past, while suspense powers the second part of the book, as new dangers face the couple.

Western Kibitzing

A Few Thoughts on the West of Reif Larsen’s ‘T. S. Spivet’

Reif Larsen’s novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, has been rumbling around in the intestines of the publishing industry for the last year or so. An auction, rumors of a near-million-dollar advance, interviews describing a strikingly original narrative that begins in Montana and ends in D.C., maps and sketches by the author…here, perhaps, I thought, might be a book that’s actually worthy of its press releases. A great American novel that happily begins in my own backyard. Alas, and to misquote Thomas Huxley, “Another beautiful premise ruined by a few ugly facts.”

Turns out, the novel’s narrator, T.S. Spivet, is a twelve-year-old genius, a kid compelled to map, complete with marginalia and commentary, the minutiae of his life. From the shape of a corn cob caught mid-crunch to the conversational dynamics around a dinner table, water table maps to the forensics of the gunshot wound that killed his brother, the kid can’t stop drawing. Over 220 sketches with accompanying marginalia are presented as an organic part of the novel itself. If you were pitching the screenplay you’d say it’s Holden Caulfield meets Shane meets Good Will Hunting, and all with a sketch pad.