“Then, what has only just bloomed within him curls brittle and brown at the edges, and he believes now, in the slow seconds of understanding, ephemeral as they ever are, that what lies behind a man in the expanding landscape of his past can never be left behind entirely,…and all that’s left is the caustic certainty that there’s no moving forward unbridled,…that the weight of all that is dragging behind will know no abatement.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (NOV 17, 2010)

Family bonds, particularly between fathers and sons, and mothers and sons, are explored with great sorrow and depth in this elegiac and epic tale of the Skala family, hard-working Czech farmers in Lavaca County. In the fertile flat lands of South Texas, in the fictional town of Dalton, 1895, Karel Skala is the fourth son born to Vaclav and Klara, and the one that results in Klara’s death. Vaclav’s pain shuts him down, and he forsakes holding his son.

Instead, Vaclav treats Karel and his brothers like draught horses and works them to the bone on the farm. As Karel grows and develops into an apt horse rider and racer, Vaclav gambles land, and Karel rides to win. A particular race in 1910 squeezes the last morsel of strained loyalty and affection between Karel, his three brothers, and his father.

The story goes back and forth in time between 1895 and 1924, in a seamless and tension-building tale that is both heart stopping and lushly evocative. Machart writes like a veteran writer and is reminiscent of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, both for his brutal tale of family instability and his towering, metaphorical passages tying the land to the people, and the narrative of his social and moral themes surrounding the decay, anguish, and redemption of the human heart. Like McCarthy, Machart has an arresting, commanding sense of predator and prey:

“Across the creek along the far bank, near the tangle of water oak and pine roots and the deep impression of boot soles in the wet silt, she [the amber-eyed horned-owl] discerns the slightest distinction in the clustered dancing of bluestem spires, knowing by some sharp and instinctive insistence in the grainy fibers of her muscles that rain and wind bend the uppermost inches of grass blades while the scuttling of prey and the dragging of a tail will set the reeds to shivering upward from the tillers.”

Machart’s frequently long and undulating sentences are not awkward or burdensome, as his assured, poetic, and elegant style takes the reader deeper and more evocatively into the richness of the landscape and the texture of Karel’s pain. Soon after the race of 1910, Karel quits riding, folds up into himself, and begins his own family and future without reconciling his past. The story brings the reader into key events in a well-paced manner that also teases out the facts gradually. The past and the present intersect in the denouement with an uncompromising and resolute exhilaration. Getting there allows the reader to accompany Karel into the territory of his tormented soul.

“It occurred to Karel that this was the way the whole county must see them, as the family that everyone but they themselves recognized as such, and the thought of being the kind of fool who called for fair weather when green clouds folded up in hail-bearing corrugations on the horizon wicked at him until he felt parched and withered and longing, like a cotton plant wilting in a month-long drought, for the unabated battering of that which might save him.”

Whether it is the rich, metallic smell of rain; the mineral scent of flooded soil; a sun-struck fence; a moonlit winter pine; or stray swirls of cotton in the brisk, smoky air of a burning mesquite tree, Machart sears the images of his story so thoroughly that they will cascade down your spine and give you an electric buzz. I can open the book anywhere and return to eloquent passages that, even lifted from the story and taken independently will cause my heart to flutter. Compelling, unyielding, and utterly satisfying.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 76 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade; 1 edition (October 21, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bruce Machart
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More to read: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy Crossers by Philip Caputo

Bibliography:

• The Wake of Forgiveness (2010)
• Men in the Making (2011)

“Ben is wearing the knife when he rides out of Lochiel, crossing into Mexico as easily as one might cross a street in Tucson or Phoenix. There is no barbed wire to impede him, no signpost except for a tall stone boundary marker to tell him that he is leaving the Arizona Territory. He’s made this trip before but feels a small buzz nonetheless—it’s an adventure for a thirteen-year-old to ride alone into another country on a fine horse like Maggie, small, lithe, and fast, a possession he prizes more than the knife hanging from his belt in a plain leather sheath.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (OCT 21, 2010)

I dashed out to buy Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Philip Caputo’s, latest novel after reading an enthusiastic review in my local newspaper. I was unfamiliar with this author, but I was intrigued by the promise of a burly border tale. I was not disappointed. This is a generational saga and epic of the southwest, bristling with illegal border crossers and warring drug cartels, studded with outlaws and vaqueros. A dense book, it starts rather slowly, gradually lassoing the reader into a complex, emotional story brittle with sepulchral secrets and spilling with scoured grief.

Gil Castle, a Wall Street broker broken by the death of his wife in the tragic events of 9/11, lives day to day in suicidal agony. At the advice of his grown daughters, he has submitted to therapy. However, the platitudes of “healing” and “closure” bring him even further to the brink of despair. He prefers to read the intellectual, reflective stoics, such as Seneca, or the Greek tragedian, Aeschylus; they speak to him with a deep and thoughtful gravitas. He rebuffs what he considers the psychobabble of grief counseling, of America’s proposition that we weren’t meant to suffer for long periods of time, “as if grief were something like digestion.” As a last grasp for hope, he decides to leave New York and move to a small cabin in Patagonia, a berg in the desert of the Arizona-Mexico border, where his cousin still owns and operates a cattle ranch that has been in the family for a century. His maternal grandfather, Ben Erskine, pioneered this business, the San Ignacio Cattle Company. What Gil and the reader gradually discover is that this sprawling ranch is riddled with “ghosts and bones.”

Two main narrative threads emerge, each with its distinct flavor, tone, and color. The author creates a scintillating outlaw tale of the early twentieth century that is both chilly and taut, ripe and ropy. The actions of Gil’s desperado descendants alternate with the modern-day fable of family and the open graves of grief. The story seamlessly goes back and forth from Gil’s twenty-first century tale to Ben Erskine’s of a hundred years ago. Peppered throughout are letters and interviews with Gil’s relatives from mid-century. Caputo heightens the broad western tale with an astute character study, giving us some salty figures a la Cormac McCarthy meets Larry McMurtry, but branding his own mark and riding in his own saddle.

Crossers keeps its narrative focus, even as the subplots spread and the landscape widens. The vengeance and violence of the drug runners and border crossers keep the pace tight and the action grisly, as well as reticulate the ancestral histories and hatreds between and within families and neighbors. Moreover, the subplots serve as allegory and as metaphor to the wide divides of the human heart, and to the sorrows and histories that threaten to bury us in modern and distant tragedies.

Some of the characters are a little contrived or thin, although there are some, like Ben and Blaine, who are vibrant, blunt, and truculent, knotted like a fist. Gil’s unbridled Midas touch is a bit too convenient at times, but it is a minor affliction. Additionally, the author laid on the idea of evil terrorists a bit thick in the beginning of the novel–but, thankfully, to a larger purpose, which became evident as the story leavened. I am reluctant to discuss my controversial perceptions of 9/11 in any detail, except that I initially considered abandoning the story. Yet my instincts told me to persevere, that this wasn’t a polemical novel. Fortunately, the author’s dynamism eclipsed the indictments and he keenly underscored the dreadful, wretched terrorists that roam our souls–the penetrating terrorists that inhabit the psyche and scream from our hearts–the terrorism of the unconsoled.

I have read complaints (of earlier works) by a few readers that Caputo’s storytelling is too expository and more suited to journalism. Occasionally, Crossers is indulgent and immoderate, and I can see vestiges of the tendency. But he reined himself in and penned a captivating, sweeping story. Even with the minor flaws, this is a powerful, piquant tapestry of a tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (October 19, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Philip Caputo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Acts of Faith

Bibliography:

• Horn of Africa (1980)
• Delcorso’s Gallery (1983)
• Indian Country (1987)
• Equation for Evil (1996)
• Exiles (1998)
• The Voyage (1999)
• Acts of Faith (May 2005)
• Crossers (October 2009)

Nonfiction:

• A Rumor of War (1977)
• Means of Escape: A Ware Correspondent’s Memoir o fLife and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Vietnam (1991)
• In the Shadows of the Morning: Essays on Wild Lands, Wild Waters, and a Few Untamed People (2002)
• 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings (2005)
• 10,000 Days of Thunder: A History of The Vietnam War (September 2005)

Related:

• Interview with Philip Caputo (1989)