THE SOUND OF THE TREES

A first novel set in 1930s New Mexico finds an extraordinarily resourceful, but emotionally wounded, 18-year-old on a violent search for moral truth.

Fed-up with his drunk, dangerously abusive father, Trude Mason puts his mother on a horse, loads up a mule with provisions, saddles up his trusty mare Triften, and heads for Colorado, where he hopes to find ranch work and make a new start. Though he stares down his knife-wielding father, Trude encounters disaster in the mountains that leaves his mother dead. Later, he witnesses and fails to avenge the murder of a young black girl's child by a gloating, well-dressed Englishman. Left in the mountains for dead, Trude wanders into a nameless town whose peculiar, pathetic Cormac McCarthy–esque denizens are betting that the arrival of a railroad spur will bring them wealth and civilization. Though he finds a friend in the wistful rancher Charlie Ford, Trude sees right through the pretentiousness of most of the townsfolk, finding little to like in the drunken hedonism of a young Italian immigrant John Frank, the gloating bigotry of the Ralston brothers, and the bloviating mayor, who lectures Trude about showing respect for authority. Trude challenges that authority when he discovers that the black girl has been imprisoned unjustly and might even be executed. Trude has to take justice into his own hands, and, in this postmodern updating of the formula western, heroic action leads to nothing but loss and sorrow. Only after returning to the mountains can Trude come to terms with the grief that plagues his heart.

Subtly drawn scenes of naturalistic beauty and sudden brutality redeem Gatewood's distracting tendency to write dialogue, some trite (an aging mentor remarks, “pain ain’t nothin’ more than the memory of comfort”), without quotation marks.