MOONLIGHT WATER

After a burned-out rock star trashes his old life, he resettles in an unlikely community, hoping the desert air will clear his head.                 

This is the first collaboration by Win Blevins, who’s primarily a historical novelist (Dreams Beneath Your Feet, 2008, etc.) and contemporary novelist Meredith Blevins (The Red Hot Empress, 2005, etc.). Appropriately, it intertwines the former’s deep and abiding interest in Native American culture with his wife’s skills in crafting romance between unlikely companions. The main character is a rock star living rough in San Francisco; Robbie Macgregor performs under the stage name Rob Roy with his popular band, the Elegant Demons. Robbie’s wife has just left him for her lesbian lover, and his inner demons are catching up with him. After a visit to his grandfather’s ashes, he decides to fake his own death. Confiding only in Gianni, his longtime business manager, Rob sets off for the wilds of America. Changing his name (and indeed, his entire personality) to “Red Stuart,” the former rock star winds up in Moonlight Water, a quirky artist’s colony deep in Mormon country that is largely populated by the Navajo people. There, he comes under the tutelage of a village elder, Winsonfred Manygoats, and quickly falls in love with Zahnie Kee, a local police officer. It’s pretty syrupy stuff. “A glorious, cool-shadowed twilight. Nary a sign of any bad guys. And the play of words and eyes of two people who were soon to be lovers, and knew it, and loved life, and the air, and the way they inhabited the world,” the authors write. Red also gets involved in a dust-up with a local thug named Wayne Kravin over the theft of Native American artifacts from the local ruins, and there’s a largely telegraphed betrayal, but neither situation generates any real tension.

A strangely dispassionate affair with a picturesque Southwest setting.