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Great narrative, rich characters
By Don Waters |
November 22, 2009, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
"TWISTED Tree," Kent Meyers's fictional small town, is in rodeo country, somewhere on the eastern perimeter of the Black Hills in South Dakota, where the "creased and broken" land is vast and veined by dirt roads.
Drive past ranches and mud lakes and bone-filled buffalo jumps and you'll spot the local bar, Ruination.
The town's inhabitants are still haunted by the massacre at nearby Wounded Knee, and now, in Meyers' impressive third novel, their grieving continues with the disappearance of Hayley Jo Zimmerman, a onetime barrel racing champion and one of the town's young daughters.
"Everyone has a life that no one else knows," Meyers writes. This statement could be spoken by any of the town's residents, but Meyers ascribes it to the stranger who prowls Interstate 90 in a big blue Lincoln Continental.
In the book's terrifying opening chapter, Hayley Jo, or Hayjay, as she's nicknamed, gets into his car. Hayjay is quietly vanishing from anorexia, but it's the other quite literal vanishing that shakes the town.
A small rural community like Twisted Tree relies on its citizens. When someone goes missing, shock waves course through the lives of its roofers, ranchers, patrolmen, caregivers and pastors.
Even the town poacher registers the loss. And losses this significant can stir up people's own stories.
Meyers creates a stunning narrative of these stories, 16 in all, quilting together an intricate patchwork from confessions, remembrances and secrets.
Each chapter, a completely self-contained account, deepens our understanding of other community members while touching upon the mysterious circumstances of Hayjay's disappearance.
What's most wonderful is Meyers' casting. There's not one flat, uninteresting character in the bunch.
After that first glimpse of Hayjay, Meyers introduces Elise, the supermarket clerk. Elise knows "the preferences of every family" and checks groceries "so slowly she could be memorizing them." (She is.)
Elise is the community's registrar of secrets, its "voiceless oracle," and, like everyone, hobbled by her own inescapable past. She offers opinions on nearly everyone, including Shane Valen, who spends "his nights grocery shopping, with a rifle."
He's a quasi-feral man who sleeps among buffalo and lives off the land his grandfather sold. Shane creeps, like vapor, seemingly everywhere, including the night Hayley Jo is born along a country road. People think Shane's "crazy as a bag of drywall screws," but he too has secrets.
So does Sophie Lawrence, who takes care of her stepfather. She's considered a saint but nobody knows, however, that she privately mistreats him.
Meyers isn't squeamish about tough subject matter. He doesn't shun life's synchronicities and embraces the "invisible filaments" that connect one thing to the next.
Drive past ranches and mud lakes and bone-filled buffalo jumps and you'll spot the local bar, Ruination.
The town's inhabitants are still haunted by the massacre at nearby Wounded Knee, and now, in Meyers' impressive third novel, their grieving continues with the disappearance of Hayley Jo Zimmerman, a onetime barrel racing champion and one of the town's young daughters.
"Everyone has a life that no one else knows," Meyers writes. This statement could be spoken by any of the town's residents, but Meyers ascribes it to the stranger who prowls Interstate 90 in a big blue Lincoln Continental.
In the book's terrifying opening chapter, Hayley Jo, or Hayjay, as she's nicknamed, gets into his car. Hayjay is quietly vanishing from anorexia, but it's the other quite literal vanishing that shakes the town.
A small rural community like Twisted Tree relies on its citizens. When someone goes missing, shock waves course through the lives of its roofers, ranchers, patrolmen, caregivers and pastors.
Even the town poacher registers the loss. And losses this significant can stir up people's own stories.
Meyers creates a stunning narrative of these stories, 16 in all, quilting together an intricate patchwork from confessions, remembrances and secrets.
Each chapter, a completely self-contained account, deepens our understanding of other community members while touching upon the mysterious circumstances of Hayjay's disappearance.
What's most wonderful is Meyers' casting. There's not one flat, uninteresting character in the bunch.
After that first glimpse of Hayjay, Meyers introduces Elise, the supermarket clerk. Elise knows "the preferences of every family" and checks groceries "so slowly she could be memorizing them." (She is.)
Elise is the community's registrar of secrets, its "voiceless oracle," and, like everyone, hobbled by her own inescapable past. She offers opinions on nearly everyone, including Shane Valen, who spends "his nights grocery shopping, with a rifle."
He's a quasi-feral man who sleeps among buffalo and lives off the land his grandfather sold. Shane creeps, like vapor, seemingly everywhere, including the night Hayley Jo is born along a country road. People think Shane's "crazy as a bag of drywall screws," but he too has secrets.
So does Sophie Lawrence, who takes care of her stepfather. She's considered a saint but nobody knows, however, that she privately mistreats him.
Meyers isn't squeamish about tough subject matter. He doesn't shun life's synchronicities and embraces the "invisible filaments" that connect one thing to the next.
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