New West Book Review

Jackson Hole residents share this trait with comic-book superheroes: their origin stories tend to be more interesting than their immediate circumstances. That may be why the bulk of Tim Sandlin’s new book, Lydia (Sourcebooks Landmark, 432 pages, $24.99), rests on a centenarian’s life-tale, while the arc compelling the novel rides on a Gotham City street-level villain with the determination of Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men. The title character connects these storylines in the narrator’s quest to understand human behavior.

“Why do we treat those we love so much worse than those we don’t like?” the narrator, Sam, writes. “Lydia would starve before not tipping a waitress. She’d go back home if the alternative was parking in a handicapped slot, yet she lied to and browbeat the family she loved.”

Tim Sandlin will visit several regional bookstores, including Valley Bookstore in Jackson (April 23, 7 p.m.), Boulder Book Store (April 25, 7:30 p.m.) Barnes & Noble stores in Fort Collins (April 26, 7 p.m.) and Colorado Springs (April 27, 7 p.m.), Denver’s Tattered Cover (Colfax, April 28, 7:30 p.m.), and Cheyenne’s Barnes & Noble (April 29, 7 p.m.).

New West Book Review

Philip Connors has spent eight seasons in a high, isolated outpost as a wilderness lookout in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, the “epicenter of American wildfire,” spotting fires for the U.S. Forest Service. How did he become one of the “freaks on the peaks,” and why does he love this job? Connors has plenty to say about these and other subjects in the entertaining and informative Fire Season: Field Notes From A Wilderness Lookout (Ecco, 256 pages, $24.99).

Connors mixes natural, personal, and literary history in this remarkable narrative, along with a touch of Ed Abbey-style ranting against America’s fat, out-of-shape people and the government’s bumbling ways when it comes to wilderness management, allowing cows to graze on public land, and agricultural subsidies. Although Connors spends most of his time in the wilderness alone, Fire Season keeps plenty of company, fitting comfortably and capably into the American nature writing tradition headed up by Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately,” and carried on by Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, which Connors calls “the one and only masterpiece ever written on the subject of American wildfire.”

Stops on Philip Connors’ book tour include visits to Bookworks in Albuquerque (April 26), Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe (April 29), Moby Dickens in Taos (April 30), Boulder Book Store (May 2, $8 tickets include a discount coupon and will benefit the Fourmile Canyon Fire Department), Tattered Cover (LoDo, May 3), Bookworm of Edwards in Edwards, Colo. (May 4) and Maria’s Bookshop of Durango, Colo. (May 5, 6:30 p.m.)

New West Book Review

Craig Lancaster never met a troubled family he didn’t like—or at least felt he couldn’t mend through dialogue and cathartic scenes of pop psychology in his novels.  Conflict between father and son was at the core of his debut, the award-winning 600 Hours of Edward and it’s front and center in his sophomore novel.

In The Summer Son, Lancaster has sliced open another vein of domestic pain for a more ambitious book.  If he’s not quite as successful here as he was with 600 Hours of Edward—a tightly-wound novel with an unforgettable narrator (the titular Edward who has Asperger’s)—then it’s not for lack of trying.  The Summer Son is looser and baggier by comparison, but it also feels more intimate.  The Billings author has put his heart into telling the story of an embittered relationship between narrator Mitch Quillen and his 71-year-old father, going deep into territory that feels both singularly personal for Lancaster and universally accessible for readers who will identify with what’s at stake here.

A New Take On Old West Lit

The first thing we do, let’s clarify “frontier.” For early Europeans in America it was what Frederick Jackson Turner called “the hither edge of free land.” (“Free” if you took it from the savages who thought it was theirs.) The struggle against the savage land re-energized the European and invigorated Americans.

Which is why John F. Kennedy called for a New Frontier in 1960 and Gene Roddenberry called outer space the Final Frontier in 1966. Conquering frontiers keeps the American soul from stagnating.

In 1782 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur called Orange Country, N.Y. the frontier. In 1823 James Fenimore Cooper moved the frontier eighty miles west to the Susquehanna River in The Pioneers. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the actual American frontier was wherever civilized custom ran headlong into savage necessities. At that point, he postulated, Americans were made.

New West Book Review

Cold Wind
by C.J. Box
Putnam, 400 pages, $25.95

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett’s long-simmering resentment against his intolerable mother-in-law, the notorious gold digger Missy Vankueren Longbrake Alden, comes to a boil in Cold Wind, the eleventh novel in C.J. Box‘s popular mystery series. Pickett is too much of a chivalrous, white-hat-wearing cowboy type to ever retaliate against his mother-in-law for her years of belittlement—but in Cold Wind, he is seriously tempted to. As Cold Wind opens, Missy’s fifth husband turns up murdered in a spectacular fashion: shot and hanging from one of the 250-foot turbines on his wind farm. When police discover the murder weapon in Missy’s car and she is arrested for the crime, Pickett is inclined to stay out of the case.

Box’s Joe Pickett novels often open with a description of a dead game animal, illegally poached, that Pickett must trace to a culprit and beyond that to further misdeeds. Cold Wind‘s introduction of a human body instead at the beginning sets the tone for the plot, which won’t involve much game warden action from Pickett. 

New West Book Review

Wrecker
by Summer Wood
Bloomsbury, 290 pages, $20

Taos-based writer Summer Wood‘s heartfelt new novel is about the unconventional upbringing of a boy named Wrecker, who is raised by a collection of well-intentioned semi-parents while he roams the redwood forests in the remote Lost Coast area of Northern California. Wrecker examines what happens when a task as complicated as raising a child is shared collectively, and delves into the doubts, frustrations, guilt, and joy that parents feel when they are confronted by the endless needs, misbehavior, and love that a child provides.

The book begins in San Francisco in 1965, when that city was “home to saints and sinners and seekers of every stripe.” One such seeker, Lisa Fay, leaves the strictures of her parents’ house to join the counterculture in San Francisco, has a fling with a sailor and is left with a son unknown by his father. She doesn’t name her son at first, “She called him HeyBoy or BigBoy or Beauty; she called him Honey and Sweetie and Champ.” When he’s a toddler she asks if he can “leave off wrecking things, for once,” and he replies, “I a wrecker,” so that’s what she names him finally—Wrecker. 

New West Book Review

Boise writer Alan Heathcock‘s gripping debut short story collection Volt is an intricately crafted examination of a fictional small town called Krafton that could be located anywhere in rural America. If you happened to pass through Krafton, you’d be advised to lock your doors and keep on driving—although on the surface it seems like a sleepy town, Krafton is riven with crime, secrets, terrible accidents, and heartache. Several characters in the book are compelled to help hide a body and several become murderers. The violence is multi-generational—characters recur, and their experience of harrowing troubles in one story doesn’t absolve them from receiving additional misery in another.

Although each story is written in timeless, distilled language, there are subtle clues that peg these stories as occurring at different times between the 1940’s and the present. Many of the characters have returned to Krafton after serving in some twentieth or twenty-first century war, irrevocably changed, and are no longer content to live peacefully in their hometown. But often it’s not war, but something unexplainable that makes these people snap. In the title story, which concludes the collection, the mother of one such character explains: “You think some are just bad or evil or whatnot, but somewhere along the way they was someone’s baby, sucking the teat like anybody. Then something puts a volt in ‘em and they ain’t the same no more.”

New West Book Review

Deep into West of Here, Jonathan Evison’s entertaining, expansive novel of Western American settlement and its aftermath, a contemporary parolee named Timmon Tillman finds himself “forced to concede that his fate was inextricably linked in the most arbitrary ways to things and people and events he’d never given a thought to.” This idea serves as a sort of a structural thesis statement for the book, whose action jumps between the late nineteenth century beginnings of Port Bonita, a fictional town on the Pacific coast of Washington state, and the down-on-their-luck residents of the town in 2006, many of them descendents of the early settlers. The ties between the two sets of characters start out loose and gradually tighten as Evison expertly weaves an array of seemingly disconnected plot threads into a panoramic tapestry.

Jonathan Evison will discuss West of Here at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on February 28 (7:30 p.m.), at the Boulder Book Store on March 1 (7:30 p.m.), at The King’s English in Salt Lake on March 3, and at several events throughout Washington and Oregon this spring.

Western Book Roundup

Last week, Borders Books filed for bankruptcy and announced the closure of 30 percent of its stores. The stores slated to close include six in Colorado (in Boulder, Dillon, Littleton, Aurora, Greeley, and Grand Junction), two in New Mexico (Santa Fe and Albuquerque), two in Utah (Murray and Logan), and one in Montana (Bozeman). The Wall Street Journal put together a chart of the closing stores here.

Meanwhile, EdRants.com offers a list of independent alternatives to the closing Borders stores, with the mileage between the closing store and the existing indie bookstore. In Colorado, there are indie bookstores close at hand in every city with a closing Borders. Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated there were no independent bookstores in Grand Junction, Colo. In fact, there are two: Twice Upon A Time Bookshop at 2885 North Avenue and Grand Valley Books at 350 Main Street.

Also in the Roundup: Emma Donoghue in Aspen, the Los Angeles Times Book Award finalists announced, and Jonathan Evison brings his book tour to Colorado and Utah.

New West Book Review

David Vann’s accomplished debut novel Caribou Island is the latest addition to a sub-branch of Western American literature that has surged recently: the house building horror story. Sarahlee Lawrence’s memoir River House details her Sisyphean struggles to build a log cabin in central Oregon, a quest that drives her relationship with her father to the brink. Last month, Annie Proulx published her first memoir, Bird Cloud, about her efforts to build a dream house on a remote plot of Wyoming land. Even though she wasn’t doing the building herself, Proulx also seems to have sacrificed some measure of her sanity and ultimately considered the enterprise a failure.

Now comes Gary and Irene, the discontented married couple at the center of David Vann’s compelling tragedy. They’ve lived on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula since they were in their twenties, when Gary quit his graduate studies in medieval literature because he wanted to move to Alaska. Now in his fifties, feeling the sting of dreams deferred, he decides it’s time to build a cabin on the remote Caribou Island and live out there, as he always planned they would before raising children and making a living got in the way.