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(More customer reviews)One of the finest books written about growing up in the West is Mark Spragg's memoir, "Where Rivers Change Direction." He's also a talented screenwriter whose "Everything That Rises" is a touching film about a rancher father and young son. So I've found myself expecting probably too much from his fiction. "The Fruit of Stone" and "An Unfinished Life" seem to lack the sparkling brilliance and deep truth of his earlier work, and I wish it wasn't so. When Spragg is good, he breaks your heart.
"An Unfinished Life" reads much like a film script. It moves along in the present tense and is largely visual, describing behavior and capturing dialogue, but often staying just on the surface and not getting to the emotional heart of a scene. The characters and situations are often a little too predictable; you feel that you've seen and heard them already somewhere else. Dedicated to author Kent Haruf ("Plainsong"), the book seems rather much inspired by that author's small-town characters of three generations. You keep wishing Spragg would just yield to his own vision, which if his memoir is any indication, has to be deeper, darker, more troubling, and powerful.
Having said all that, I won't discourage readers from enjoying many of the pleasures that are to be found in this novel. A master of quirky dialogue, Spragg writes several scenes, mostly between the two old men at the center of the story, full of quiet verbal sparring that makes their relationship spring to life. The tentative friendship between a young sheriff and a woman on the run from an abusive husband keeps us interested. And his journey into the mind of the husband who stalks her is thoroughly creepy and disturbing.
But for readers who don't know Spragg, I'd point them instead to his memoir, "Where Rivers Change Direction." It's the real thing.
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