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Summary
Summary
Mark Spragg's fiction debut is the story of the lifelong friendship between two men and their love for the woman who eludes them. Though Gretchen is married to his best friend, McEban has been in love with her since they were children growing up on adjacent ranches in Wyoming. When she leaves her husband for a new life, the two men follow her on an odyssey across the American West that forces truths and tests the ultimate, mystical extremes of love and loyalty. Muscular, vivid, wise, tender, funny, and true: Mark Spragg's much-anticipated first novel is entirely unforgettable.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Spragg's debut novel (after the well-received memoir, Where Rivers Change Direction) is a stylish western, set in present-day Wyoming and revolving around a longstanding romantic triangle. Barnum McEban, usually just known as McEban, is a 41-year-old bachelor living on his father's ranch with Ansel, the family ranch hand. His best friend, rancher-turned-developer Bennett Reilly, is married to McEban's old girlfriend, Gretchen. When Gretchen leaves Bennett, she also leaves behind a note recommending that he track her to Bozeman and bring McEban with him. Bennett follows this advice, making the second half of the book a road trip through Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The two men are a fine pair: Bennett half-manic and defeated, and McEban sunk in guilt and memories. In Yellowstone Park, Bennett beats up a mute ranger and picks up two drifting Indians, 29-year-old Rita and her nine-year-old brother, Paul. Their company and the company of Rita's dead sister, Alma, with whom Rita is in constant communication distracts Bennett and McEban, but cannot keep Bennett from following the self-destructive course he is embarked on to a tragic end. Spragg has a nice ear for dialogue and can invest a character (notably Bennett) with comic energy. Unfortunately, all too often he obscures the solid virtues of his storytelling beneath the overfamiliar stoic lyricism that has become almost de rigueur in westerns in the wake of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. Author tour; foreign rights sold in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A debut novel by Wyoming denizen Spragg (the memoir Where Rivers Change Directions, 1999, not reviewed) describes two men who love the same woman. The scenario behind Truffaut's Jules and Jim travels better than you might think: there are women all across the world capable of breaking hearts by the pair. In Valentine, Wyoming, Barnum McEban grew up as much in love with his childhood pal Bennett as he was with his childhood sweetheart Gretchen. McEban is a tough character, as tough as his Scots forebears who crossed the Atlantic and didn't stop until they found themselves on the prairies of the American West in 1917, and he isn't one to fall to pieces when fate deals him a bad hand. So he takes it on the chin when Gretchen marries Bennett and stays in touch with him over the next 20 years-only to find the wound still fresh and raw when Gretchen tells him she is leaving Bennett for a physicist in Denver. As distraught for Bennett's sake as for his own, McEban convinces the jilted husband to follow after Gretchen-and hits the road beside him. There is a symbiotic side to McEban's personality that may be the result of having been born a twin (and having lost his baby brother while still in the crib). At any rate, he's definitely one for joint action. While on their quest to win back Gretchen, McEban learns that Gretchen had been pregnant with his child (lost in a miscarriage) before she married Bennett, and he begins to wonder whether he or Bennett is the more aggrieved party. By the time they find Gretchen, the alliances are more confusing than ever. Quite powerful in a restrained kind of way. A fine beginning for a talented new hand.
Booklist Review
The Wyoming high country has been well served in recent fiction. First there was Allen Morris Jones' debut Last Year's River [BKL S 15 01], about a transplanted New Yorker who falls in love with a shell-shocked vet in the years after World War I, and now we have another superb first novel, the story of a recalcitrant Wyoming rancher who understands the land but struggles to master the tricky terrain of the heart. Spragg, the author of the much-acclaimed memoir, Where Rivers Change Direction (1999), upsets our expectations from the outset of this remarkable love story. McEban, a hard-bitten rancher drifting into middle age, has been in love with Gretchen all his life. The affair they began in high school ended suddenly, however, when she married McEban's best friend, Bennett, leaving McEban to vent his frustration by working the land, following in the footsteps of his father, "a man who put his shoulder against the life God gave him and went to work." Spragg begins with McEban and Gretchen in bed, having suddenly resumed their affair. But before McEban can make sense of what has happened, Gretchen has vanished, leaving both her husband and her lover, apparently for a third man, but instructing them to follow her. So begins a most peculiar road novel. McEban and Bennett trail Gretchen across the West, chasing the past as well as the future and accumulating eccentric companions in the process, including a pregnant teenager who talks to the dead. As in much of western fiction, Spragg finds poetry (and humor) in silence, revealing his characters' depth of feeling in what they don't say and how they don't say it. "You the guy chasing his wife across the West?" someone asks McEban. "I'm the guy with the guy," he responds. Nothing happens as we expect it to happen on McEban's odyssey, but every note Spragg hits seems right. These aren't the first rugged individualists to be hogtied by love, but they just may be the most memorable. --Bill Ott
Library Journal Review
McEban and his neighbor Bennett, two middle-aged Wyoming ranchers, have been friends since they were children. Both men are in love with the same woman, Gretchen Simpson, who is currently Bennett's wife. As the book opens, Gretchen has just spent the night with McEban. But as she explains the next morning, this is not the beginning of an illicit affair but instead her way of saying goodbye before she leaves town for good. The two friends follow the runaway Gretchen across the high plains in a pickup truck, meeting an assortment of colorful rural characters along the way. Spragg is best known for Where Rivers Change Direction, a collection of autobiographical essays about growing up on a Wyoming ranch. Like that memoir, the best part of this first novel is his reverent depiction of ranch life, told in lean, workmanlike prose. Unfortunately, Spragg is much less adept at character development. Gretchen never comes alive on the page, which makes it difficult to take seriously the men's burning desire to bring her back home. Nevertheless, Spragg's celebration of old-time values will appeal to fans of Donald McCaig and Kent Haruf. Recommended mainly for larger regional collections. Edward St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.