THE HIGH HEAVEN

A dizzying and yet still earthy take on a woman’s life in two centuries featuring Izzy Gently, whose travels from New Mexico to Texas to Louisiana reveal as much about America’s flaws as her own.

“It’s like there’s just some places that, after one visit, you gotta carry bits of it with you all the way to your grave” says Izzy Gently, protagonist of Wheeler’s stunning debut novel. She’s speaking about the moon, with which she’s obsessed from her childhood in a cult in New Mexico to her later care for “the moonless”—people who can no longer see that object in the night sky. Izzy herself drifts like a satellite. The book’s first third, “A Tale of the Acid West,” finds pre-teen Izzy caught by the local sheriff during a raid on the cult, then sent to live with rancher Oliver Gently and his doctor wife, Maude, who have love to spare. Between the excitement of the 1969 moon landing and the Hollywood production of a movie called High Heaven that keeps Izzy and her pals in pocket money (they shake precious White Sands gypsum from horse droppings), it seems she might have a home. But in the book’s second section, “A Texas Picaresque,” restlessness takes Izzy first to Lubbock and years at a diner, then to Plainview and aimless but mostly benign casual sex and drug use, and on to a stint as caretaker of a hidden marijuana grove by the Neches River. The final section, “A Southern Gothic Silhouette,” finds Izzy in Louisiana, now a weary social worker at New Orleans General Hospital. Her life revolves around her partner, Eli, and her enormous, never-blooming plant, La Reina de la Noche, that she grew from a cutting. She’ll take pieces of it, or at least its otherworldly essence, all the way to her grave. There isn’t even space to mention the monkey astronauts or the menstrual cups. Izzy’s tale is strange and wild, but it’s also one that illuminates our national obsession with new highs, and new heights.

Fans of Tom Robbins, Barry Hannah, and Harry Crews should check out this dynamic, fresh life-on-the-road novel.