THE SECRET LIFE OF COWBOYS
By Tom Groneberg (Scribner, $24)
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Groneberg plus iconic dog and truck.
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On his first day on a cattle ranch in Montana, writer Tom Groneberg witnessed his first birth. He also saw a lot of cows and calves die during birth. To top it all off, he saw a calf being wrapped in the skin of a dead newbornthe ranchers hoped to trick a cow into thinking the orphan calf she was suckling was her stillborn offspring.
That's a pretty heavy first day on the job.
But after responding to an Utne Reader ad in the '80s for a job leading horseback rides on a Colorado dude ranch, Groneberg became addicted to the land and life of the ranching West. The result is this earnest, idealistic memoir of an MFA-manqu魴urned-cowboy.
After schlepping tourists from Topeka for a few years, Groneberg's tale eventually becomes something much more epic: He hires on at a working ranch, then convinces his retired parents to loan him the money to buy his very own 10,000-acre spread in desolate eastern Montana. "Life is the line between what is true and what is imagined," he writes. Especially if Daddy's cutting the checks.
Still, you have to admire the balls of the whole project, following through on a reckless dream. But despite a vision statement for his ranch (plus a prescription for Paxil), it's obvious where Groneberg's cowboy project is headed. Preparing for the change of seasons, he writes, "Hopefully, the winter won't be too bad, and we can struggle through with the hay I did bale."
Winters get 30 below zero in Miles City, Mont.
There are periodic fresh glimpses of life on today's high plains: portraits of laconic Marlboro Men who read Chomsky; ranch hands who say things like, "I'll undummy Mr. Rabbit"; and a harrowing account of a retired rancher who lives in a decaying home among coffee cans filled with piss. And Groneberg's tale of chickening out during bronc-riding school is self-deprecating and funny.
Cowboys is nothing if not honest. Unfortunately, most of the author's candor is either morose or syrupy, which makes for occasionally maddening reading full of scratched souls, beating hearts, and vague pronouncements of love for his girlfriend (and future wife). "You have to be here to believe any of it," Groneberg says of life on the ranch. Since most of us don't have a blank check, we'll have to take his word for it. ANDREW ENGELSON
Tom Groneberg will read at Elliott Bay Book Co. (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 5:30 p.m. Fri., Aug. 22.
PARASITES LIKE US
By Adam Johnson (Viking, $24.95)
Stanford creative writing prof Adam Johnson set a record by selling stories to Best New American Voices four years in a row. Last year, his first short-fiction collection, Emporium, won raves for subversive fantasy reminiscent of Vonnegut and T.C. Boyle. Johnson's debut novel is a mess, but a significant mess, teeming with clever conceits, superb turns of phrase, observations as precise as Updike's, and tonal echoes of Vonnegut, Boyle, and George Saunders. The hero is Hank, a South Dakota anthropologist who argues that the Clovis people, the Paleo-Indians who hiked over from Siberia 12,000 years ago, undid their culture by eradicating 35 species with the deadliest weapon on earth: the Clovis spear point. In the course of Parasites, modern technology undoes humanity, ultimately causing Hank and a few friends to flee back across the icy wastes.
But the plot is an afterthought. This is no stern, nerdy eco-sermon. The first half is surprisingly like Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, a hip, funny send-up of academic losers. Hank, a bourbon-fueled seducer in a '72 Corvette, inspires prizewinning grad student Eggers to live for a year on the campus quad strictly by Pleistocene technology: mastodon-tusk lodge, goatskin breeches, parka of brain-tanned hide sewn with a heron's-beak needle. (When he's busted for using his razor-sharp, obsidian-tipped rodent stick to pluck Spicy Taco- flavor Doritos from the vending machine, he protests, "I'm gathering!") Then, as the town's cheesy Indian casino breaks ground for a new wing, Eggers discovers a priceless Clovis point and an entire skeleton older than Kennewick Man. He talks Hank into letting him excavate it using Pleistocene technology.
So far, so great. Alas, when Hank falls for a skimpily conceived Russian agricultural historian, his team gets busted for grave robbing, he gets sent to a prison run by a crazy ex-cop who secretly breeds Pomeranians for dogsled teams, and the story goes off the rails. Pretty soon we're in a drab rehash of Stephen King's The Stand, written with superior wit and command of English but less imagination, no conviction, and none of the sheer sweeping force of King's narrative. Johnson isn't imagining a world, just brilliantly riffing from scene to scene, incompetently mixing pathos and yuks. But the author is wise, weird, and worth watching. He should write a real novel sometime soon. TIM APPELO
Adam Johnson will read at Elliott Bay Book Co. (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 7:30 p.m. Mon., Aug. 25.
TRAPLINES: COMING HOME TO SAWTOOTH VALLEY
By John Rember (Pantheon, $22)
John Rember isn't a very notable person; he's just an Idaho country boy turned college professor at Caldwell's rural Albertson College. But what he catalogs in this memoirthe downward spiral of the West at the hands of the federal governmentis very noteworthy, indeed.
