CLOUDMAKER

Teenage cousins get the jump on the aviation age in 1930s Montana.

In an opening suggesting a Disney-esque Western adventure, Houston "Huck" Finn, a 14-year-old engineering prodigy in Big Coulee, Montana, designs his own glider, wrecks it in a ballfield, then turns to his next project—building, in his father Roy’s smithy, a prop airplane powered by a Ford engine and, later, supercharged with vacuum cleaner parts. Brooks' singular style, evoking the ornate vernacular of a cowboy poet, does not quite distract from the fact that we’re going deep—too deep—into the mechanics of any practical challenge that might arise, such as retrieving a gangster’s body from a trout stream with an ingenious pulley system. Huck and his bookish pal, Raleigh, find a Lindbergh flight watch on the body, and Huck can’t resist hoarding this talisman of his idol. That watch provides the key to a mystery plot that quickly fades into irrelevance. Huck’s 18-year-old cousin, Annelise, newly arrived from California, sports an identical watch, on loan from her flight instructor and first lover. Annelise’s “ruin” is the reason her mother has exiled her to Montana. Her maternal Aunt Gloria, Huck’s mother, worships charismatic preacher Aimee Semple McPherson almost as much as Annelise adores Amelia Earhart, who, as this novel’s convoluted and multivoiced action unfolds, vanishes over the Pacific. Annelise will test-pilot Huck’s new rig and court new ruin with Roy’s assistant, McKee, a former member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, she’s sometimes arbitrarily sidelined, as is Gloria, who spends long stretches of the novel in Bible-thumping seclusion at the family ranch. But Brooks won’t let any of his characters be marginalized, or stereotyped, for long. The backstories of Roy, McKee, and Gloria are a vivid, anecdotal compendium of Western disgrace and glory. Although the flight scenes are majestic, they’re often truncated by excessively detailed preflight tinkering. Amid all the eloquence, history, scenery, and how-to, forward momentum stalls.

An occasionally profound novel that takes risks with language and readers’ patience.