Liar's Moon: A Long Story

The conquest of the American West is, Janus-like, a myth with two faces, one looking forward and one back. The closing of the frontier is a story of adventure, of exhilarating challenges and wild, improbable victories; it is at the same time a story tinged with melancholy and defeat. This complex double view is the defining spirit of Kimball's rambunctious and radiant second novel, his first (after Harvesting Ballads, 1984) in 15 years. Tall tales, rants and circuit sermonizing mesh with a modicum of history, geography and chronology to form a tale more spun than told. Two children, one white and one black, topple off the back of an overloaded wagon heading into Kansas in 1859 and are raised by coyotes. Years later, the white boy's brother, now a circuit preacher, goes in search of them. He enlists the aid of a woman who as a child was stolen from Texas by Indians, was tracked down and brought home, then escaped and went back to the Indian settlement. Thus her fate is joined with that of the Indians, who are scattered, divided and murdered at the same time that the land is being parceled off and fenced, and the cattle drives and the old renegade way of life brought to an end. Faulknerian in style and in its multiple and overlapping points of view, the novel is distinguished by its voice--elevated and raw, bluntly literal and rhapsodically lyrical, more concerned with nouns than verbs, and more often relying on lists than completed sentences. The plot line is thus sometimes difficult to follow, but it permeates the imagination with the mythic lore of the West. Though far from a conventional western, this incandescently imaginative, beautifully written narrative follows in a long tradition of books and films that have evoked the epic struggle for, triumph over and loss of the American frontier. (Sept.)