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(More customer reviews)I rated this a 4.5 and then rounded up to 5 stars. The book is a good read, but it should probably come with instructions: "Some Assembly Required." It's structured as a kind of picaresque novel, two men in a pickup (with a horse and a dog) traveling over Wyoming and some other western states in pursuit of a wife who has left home. Along the way, they are joined by a young Native American woman and a boy. This story is intercut with flashbacks to the boyhood and early youth of one of the men. And each section of the novel ends with a surreal dream sequence. How all these pieces fit together is kind of up to the reader.
There's material here that you'll find in the author's "Where Rivers Change Direction" and in his film script for "Everything That Rises" -- a rancher father and son, a man whose parents died when he was young, an old wise bachelor cowboy, the Wyoming landscape, the turn of seasons, horses, ranch work, accidents and injuries. And as in both those other works, Spragg reveals his wonderful gift for revealing character through dialogue. The book is worth reading just for how people talk to each other in a wry, ironic, self-deprecating way. And the precision in his observations of human behavior and the outdoors is in top form.
Compared to the thoughtful, interior quality of Spragg's essays, which really get you inside the mind of the writer, the novel is more cinematic. It gives vivid images of surfaces, and the inner life and motivations of the characters have to be surmised from their behavior, which is often quirky, impulsive, and upredictable. A rancher's wife loses her mind and disappears, the rancher commits suicide, a woman believes she is accompanied by a dead sister, a park ranger is attacked and left unconscious in a culvert, a man enters a convenience store and aims a rifle at the cashier. These things happen with little explanation, and the central character seems to feel that none is needed. I also found myself wanting a more inward look to understand the two middle-aged friends at the center of the story, who happen to love the same woman.
Still and all, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in modern-day western literature and first-rate writing. When Spragg is at his best, he's right on the money -- a man with too much to drink roping road signs from the back of a truck, a woman dying of cancer, the step-by-step process of replacing a corner post in a corral fence, the heat and dust behind the chutes at a rodeo, a boy caring for a friend with a broken foot in a snowstorm. As a companion, readers of this book would be interested in Gretel Ehrlich's novel "Heart Mountain". Set during the 1940s, it involves a similar love-struck bachelor cowboy living alone on a Wyoming ranch.
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