THE LAKE

Enormously impressive first fiction from poet and blacksmith Villasenor, who traces the trajectory of a despondent philosopher from the nuthouse to a place he can finally call home.

To reach that place, however, Zachary Brannagan first must bring tragedy into the lives of those who care most about him. Though he was once a promising young scholar, Zach's cloistered, studious life has been in ruins since the night he lay down to sleep in the middle of a road outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Institutionalized, he befriends an elderly psychiatrist, who loans him the money to travel in search of his natural parents, somewhere on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. But ill fortune strikes Zach in New Orleans: his money stolen, he lives on the street until taken to a Catholic shelter, where on his first night he's assaulted and sliced with a razor. Fleeing blindly, he finds his way by chance to The Lake, a backwoods haven for maimed and afflicted children run by the supremely capable Anna, who seems to need nothing other than the company of her charges. At this refuge Zach begins to heal physically and spiritually, in the process making friends with the shelter's most special child, Samuel, a redheaded epileptic who doesn't speak but nonetheless communicates eloquently. Though he's grown close to Anna as well, Zach tears himself away to resume his journey, taking Samuel with him. They find disaster on the road soon enough, and the shock of it brings Zach at last to an understanding of what truly matters. As the story unfolds, this already engrossing drama of sadness and redemption is elevated to an even higher level by the author's poetic sensibility, which conveys to the most ordinary things a rare luster and warmth that recast the whole of reality in the shimmering, singing colors of a rainbow.

A literary feast.