LE FRUIT DE LA TRAHISON

Mark Spragg, author of the widely praised memoir Where Rivers Change Direction, sets off his first novel, The Fruit of Stone, with a cacophony of twittering birds. Starlings, sparrows, and magpies punctuate Barnum McEban's glorious morning-after with his best friend's wife, Gretchen. When Gretchen leaves town and her marriage behind, McEban and his bereft friend Bennett follow her letters from post-office boxes in Wyoming to Montana and back. Cutting through the road-trip action and Bennett's tenuous control over his temper and his rifle is the story of McEban's own family. His emotionally closed father, his migraine-riddled mother, the brusque but paternal ranch foreman Ansel, and his grandmother form a parallel tale of life on the ranch: hard work, hard living, and hard times. Spragg spins a good Western yarn and infuses every natural landscape with poetic intention, but the writing drags in these transcendent descriptions. The story reads at its most authentic in the terse dialogue between the two hardened friends; their inability to speak poetically to each other brings out more emotion than a flock of pretty birds. --Emily Russin