New West Book Review

“Old Border Road”: An Avant-Garde Take on the Western Novel

By Jenny Shank, 1-31-11

Old Border Road
by Susan Froderberg
Little, Brown and Company, 292 pages, $23.99

In her first novel Old Border Road, set amid an epic drought in a small town near the Arizona/Mexico border, Susan Froderberg uses striking, poetic language to convey the parched landscape and internal stagnation of the narrator, seventeen-year-old Katherine. Katherine, who is almost always referred to as Girl, marries a young man named Son. Son turns out to be a chronic womanizer, heading to town to carouse and leaving Girl home with her mother-in-law Rose and her father-in-law, whom she calls Rose’s Daddy, in an old adobe house where the four live together on a ranch. The stripped-down character names are a clue to Froderberg’s aim to tell an elemental story of desiccating weather and thwarted dreams.

Rose’s Daddy proposes Girl learn to ride a horse so she can win a prize in barrel racing at the rodeo that everyone in town awaits with anticipation:

“He says I will dress western for the barrels, and I will dress English for the jumps, and I will be ruffled and glittered on rodeo days. You will be holding trophies and showing ribbons of your own. Just wait, he says, someday you shall be waving a white-gloved hand in the parade. And Son will ride behind you in the posse. And he will love you all the better for it…it will help keep him home some.”

As the above excerpt illustrates, Froderberg uses no quotation marks to differentiate dialogue—neither does Cormac McCarthy, whose linguistic echoes are clear in this novel. Like McCarthy, Froderberg refers to cattle as “beeves,” but unlike McCarthy’s works that use this sort of archaic language, Old Border Road seems to be set in the present day.

Occasionally Froderberg’s beat-around-the-bush language can be silly, as when she refers to “games of ball kicking or bat swinging” instead of just saying soccer or baseball, but more often her unusual language offers a fresh envisioning of some frequently described setting or phenomenon. For example, the following passage, which describes a day Son and Girl spent together during their brief, happy honeymoon, at first seems to be about an unfamiliar place:

“We stop at a famous place in Angels City, and I’m lucky they don’t card me, and we drink whiskey and dance a-go-go at a disco, confident as if we should be locals in the place, even with Son dressed in cowboy boots and with the faded ring of snuff tin on the hip pocket of his dungarees. We take rides to the moon and we startle at alligators and we climb up into the tree houses and we spin about in teacups, all in a fantasyland…”

By the time you read to the end of it, you realize that “Angels City” is Los Angeles and Girl is referring to a day spent in Disneyland, an experience Froderberg’s fresh perspective has stripped of its banality.

Son proves to be a repellant figure, good for not much but sullen moods and inconstancy. One character describes him in this way: “He cares for little but the one thing. Well, that an rodeo’ing, so that makes two things, I guess.” But for a long time Girl stays loyal to him, asking herself, “What does he see in all his other-than-me’s?”

The contemporary West Old Border Road portrays is a stylized one, in which the entire town looks forward to an annual rodeo that does not seem to occur for an interminable period. Most people’s lives revolve around horses, and the townsfolk fall under the thrall of the mysterious Padre, whose church many of them attend. The town’s most prominent figure is a woman named Pearl Hart, who named herself after the famous Old West outlaw, and named her daughter Pearl, too. So the daughter is known as Daughter Pearl. Son keeps falling and hitting his head, becoming more and more unreasonable, and takes an interest in Daughter Pearl.

Various men step in as father figures with advice and sympathy for Girl, who is timid and young, lacking skills and education, and doesn’t take any decisive action until the second half of the book. A lot of the plot doesn’t make much sense—it’s kind of a dreamy jumble—but all of it is beautifully described in Froderberg’s unique voice. And in the end the spellbinding language proves to be the point of Old Border Road, a conjuring of the Old West through the lens of modern times, with uncommon and wonderful landscape and flora terms such as “arenal,” “ocotillo,” “vega,” and “fumarole,” sprinkled through the narrative to bringing this dreamscape to life.

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