The Deep Blue Memory

An extended family of Basque Americans in Nevada perform a precarious balancing act between assimilation and affirmation of their ethnic roots in this lyrical, highly descriptive first novel. The nameless narrator, like the author a lawyer from Reno, recalls fond girlhood interactions with her immigrant grandfather, a rugged rancher who finds in Nevada's snowy terrain a sense of continuity with nature that the Basque country's green hills once afforded. She spends a year abroad with her parents, attending a French Basque grammar school at which she learns more about her heritage. The first American-born generation finds success and stress: the narrator's father is a writer, her Uncle Luke a U.S. senator whose opponents tarnish his image with a smear campaign. Luke's lawsuit to clear his name brings the clan together but also triggers the suicide of one member. In incantatory, at times self-indulgent prose, Urza conveys a sense of the family as an unbroken circle cradling both the individual and a living culture. (June)