In Search of Snow

Urrea wrests strange, beautiful poetry out of a mean, lean desert terrain--Arizona, mid-1950s--in this impressive first novel, a blend of deadpan humor, picaresque adventure and search for self. Home for Mike McGurk is a gas station run by his widower father, Wallace (aka Texaco Turk) McGurk, an ornery bigot whose glory days as bare-knuckles boxing champ and WW II hero are behind him. Mike, age 27, is adrift; haunted by the memory of his mother, who died when he was seven, he has a guilt-ridden affair with his college-bound cousin Lily and then gets mixed up with Ramses Castro, a roughneck Apache gang leader. When Texaco Turk dies, Mike is rescued by Bobo Garcia, the Mexican-American mechanic. Their peripatetic adventures end in Bobo's hometown, where Mike, informally adopted into the Garcia family, comes to terms with his feelings about his macho father. Some of the novel's strongest scenes are the early depictions of Mike and his father, whose bluster is a veneer to hide his own sense of failure. Equally moving are Bobo's flashbacks to Buchenwald, where he helped liberate inmates of the Nazi concentration camp. Author of a nonfiction book on the Mexican border ( Across the Wire ), Urrea brings the glint of truth to his fictional characters and settings. Author tour. (Apr.)