New York Review of Books Review
HERE IN THE LONE STAR STATE, We have a subgenre of the Great American Novel we like to call the Novel as Big as Texas. A representative N.A.B.A.T. features lots of pages crowded with multiple generations of characters fighting Comanches, driving cattle, bringing in oil wells, eating Mexican food, settling ancestral grudges and brooding about the pitiless immensity of the Land. The category arguably began with Edna Ferber's "Giant" and has proven elastic enough to encompass not just earnest cycloramic texts like James Michener's "Texas" but also literary benchmarks as varied as Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove," Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy and Philipp Meyer's recent epic, "The Son." James Lee Burke's enormous reputation centers mostly on the 20 novels in his Dave Robicheaux mystery series, which is set in Louisiana. But Burke was born in Houston and has long conducted a brisk side business west of the Sabine River with novels that chronicle the lives of the Hollands, an archetypically Texan clan. Son Holland, the patriarch, appeared in "Two for Texas," which took place during the time of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, and his descendants Hackberry Holland and Hack's cousin Billy Bob Holland each anchor their own series of mystery novels. Now comes Weldon Avery Holland, the hero of a big, broad, engagingly over-stuffed new novel set with rousing confidence in midcentury Texas. "Wayfaring Stranger" isn't a mystery, exactly, though it contains a whole lot of mysterious stuff. It's more a sprawling narrative rumination on good and evil, with a plot conveniently attached. Like much of Burke's fiction, it's saturated with the romance of the past while mournfully attuned to the unholy menace of the present. In this case, the present begins in the 1930s, when 16-year-old Weldon and his grandfather encounter Bonnie and Clyde hiding out on their property. Weldon's grandfather - if I've got my begats straight - is also the grandfather of Hackberry and Billy Bob Holland. Also named Hackberry, he's a tough old bird whose exploits include arresting John Wesley Hardin, herding cattle on the great trail drives and fighting against Pancho Villa. Weldon is entranced with the glamorous, beret-wearing Bonnie ("She was my first love"), but after a tense confrontation that ends with one of the gang members spitting on his grandfather, the boy fires a round from a .44 into their fleeing car. This opening sequence is extraordinarily taut and vivid, as are subsequent chapters in which Weldon, grown up and serving as an infantry lieutenant, survives a German onslaught during the Battle of the Bulge and finds himself trapped behind enemy lines with a sergeant named Hershel Pine. Weldon and Hershel stumble into the horror of a Nazi death camp where the only person left alive is Rosita Lowenstein, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War. Though she's barely breathing, she's beautiful and passionate, and greets Weldon with "Viva La República. No pasarán." She reminds him, he tells her later, "of someone I met when I was 16. Her name was Bonnie Parker." Like a lot of tough-guy writers, Burke has a sappy streak, and he wants to make sure we don't miss how hard Weldon and Rosita fall for each other. The book is narrated mostly by Weldon, who informs us that Rosita's thighs are "like long golden carp" and that "to make love with Rosita Lowenstein was to enter a Petrarchan sonnet." These two don't just complement each other, they can't stop complimenting each other: "You're an honorable and brave man," "You're my sister and lover and wife and mother and daughter and all good things that women are," "You fill me with light when you're inside me." Good for them. Because there are dark forces in the world, intent on driving them apart. The trouble begins when Weldon and Hershel return to Texas after the war, settle in Houston and build a pipeline company together, using the same innovative welding process that held together the German Tiger tanks that overran their position in the Ardennes. Hershel comes in for his share of compliments too - not only does he have a genius for pipeline construction, he possesses "the chivalric virtues of an Arthurian knight." Unfortunately this attribute is underappreciated by his wife, Linda Gail, a pretty, gaptoothed Bogalusa girl with ungovernable worldly ambitions. She yearns for the country club comforts of River Oaks, Houston's wealthiest neighborhood, a place whose appeal is lost on her humble, hapless husband. River Oaks, in Weldon's reckoning, is dangerous territory, the habitat of people like Roy Wiseheart, the charismatic but messed-up son of a nefarious H.L. Hunt-style oil baron, and of Roy's scary wife, Clara, a snobby and anti-Semitic "human tarantula." Weldon and Rosita and Hershel and Linda Gail are beset by an omnium-gatherum of business rivals, sadistic detectives, smarmy Hollywood talent scouts and anti-Communist witch hunters. It's unclear why the newly created Dixie Belle Pipeline Company represents such a disturbance to their blackhearted universe. At first you think these people just want to go into business with Weldon and Hershel; then you think they want to put them out of business; then you begin to understand their shadowy agenda involves nothing less than "to rob the innocent of their faith in humanity and to destroy the light and happiness that all of us seek." The jeopardy is overcooked and underspecified. "Our enemies," Weldon informs us, "whoever they were, had created a masterpiece of misery." I'm not sure that the "whoever they were" is ever satisfyingly clarified, but even when he's laying down a smoke screen, Burke knows how to keep a story humming along. Weldon and company are stalked, blackmailed, betrayed, beaten, violated, arrested, pursued and seduced. Linda Gail - the least pure-hearted of Burke's main characters, and therefore the most interesting - is lured to Hollywood, intent on becoming a movie star. And she enters into a self-destructive affair with Roy Wiseheart. (Infidelity is no surprise to her cynical director, who assures her that on a spring night in "Babylon-by-the-Sea," you can "hear the hymens snapping like crickets.") For Weldon and Rosita, the peril is more immediate. Suspected of being a Communist, Rosita is arrested at dawn by a posse of shotgun-wielding deputies and sent off to a mental asylum in Wichita Falls. It's up to Weldon to liberate his "Hebrew warrior woman from the House of Jesse," and to do so will require, among other things, a coincidental reunion - or, more charitably, a mystical reconnection - with Bonnie and Clyde's getaway car. The porous border between past and present, the battle between haunted heroes who seek the light and those who draw their power from darkness - all this is pretty thickly applied, sometimes smothering the action with moralistic atmosphere. But this is a James Lee Burke novel, and he makes the rules. There may be thighs like long golden carp and hymens snapping like crickets, but the novel is also full of prose as strong and precise as Hershel Pine's pipeline welds - a kindly spruced-up drunk with slicked-back hair "like paint poured on a rock," the burly roughneck on a doodlebug barge whose tattoo looks like "the food-dye lettering on the rind of a smoke-cured ham." And then there's Burke's sense of place, which is so richly interwoven with his sense of history. You can count on him to bring alive the oil patch, the plaza in front of the Alamo, the surprising pastoral pleasures of Houston, an East Texas fishing camp whose ground is covered with shell middens left behind by vanished Indians. In some ways, "Wayfaring Stranger" feels almost too big for a novel as big as Texas, too portentous, too invested in its own mythic significance. But in other crucial ways, it feels exactly the right size. STEPHEN HARRIGAN is a writer at large for Texas Monthly. His most recent books are the novel "Remember Ben Clayton" and the essay collection "The Eye of the Mammoth."
Library Journal Review
Burke's (Light of the World) latest is a -character-driven stand-alone novel featuring members of the Holland family from his "Hackberry Holland" series (Lay Down My Sword and My Shield; Rain Gods). Following the Battle of the Bulge in January 1945, Lt. Weldon Holland of Texas and Sgt. Hershel Pine of Louisiana are left to fend for themselves. Stumbling upon an abandoned concentration camp, they rescue Rosita, the woman who will become Weldon's wife. After the war, Hershel and Weldon go into the oil business together, laying pipelines in Texas and Louisiana. Weldon and Rosita become fast friends with Hershel and his wife, Linda, a rising Hollywood star. Unflappable and old-fashioned, Weldon discovers that his relationships will be pushed further than he could imagine when blackmailers threaten the couples. Weldon stands firm against injustice, no matter how out of hand the situation gets. VERDICT Similar in sweep to Edna Ferber's Giant, this intricately plotted novel is recommended to readers interested in dramatic renderings of the societal changes of postwar America. While there is the suspense that Burke's fans expect, they will find the pace slower than in his previous novels. [See Prepub Alert, 1/10/14.]-Emily Hamstra, Univ. of Michigan Libs., Ann Arbor (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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