On the road again

BOOK REVIEW explored by her own son, Hank.

The resolution of Lamont’s disappearance is satisfying and artfully handled (and it’s hard to fault a thriller that involves back issues of National Geographic purchased at a library sale), but that’s only part of the novel’s strength.

As Celine and Pete travel the west, following Lamont’s trail in a truck camper they have borrowed from Hank, the world seems to open up into a series of arresting vistas and carefully wrought descriptions. Heller, who is a contributing editor at Outside magazine and National Geographic Adventure, and whose non-fiction books include Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River and Set Free in China: Sojourns on the Edge, is a gifted nature writer, able to capture the inherent power of the natural world and use it for narrative effect. There’s little in the way of passive description here; in Heller’s hands, the natural world becomes a compelling character in its own right.

One of the other great strengths of the novel is its sense of awkward juxtapositions and hidden contradictions. Elbie Chicksaw, the tracker who helped in the investigation of Lamont’s disappearance, who lives in a “shithole” at “the end of an unmaintained logging road” is revealed as a former student of comparative literature at Dartmouth. An account of Celine’s encounter with Bruce Willis, while she is transporting a Glock through an airport, is followed immediately by an overview of her early days, and her family’s position in society. The reader is continually kept off balance, uncertain, but rapidly conditioned to look beyond surfaces, to seek deeper truths. In a way, that’s how Celine herself sees the world, and it’s a powerful skill to adopt.

It’s especially key when it comes to Celine herself. The stylish senior, who suffers from emphysema after a lifetime of smoking, “too elegant, or vain” to wear oxygen, is canny and crafty, gifted at making connections that only appear to be leaps of logic. Despite her physical weakness, she has a quiet strength, revealed in confrontations with a government agent and a bar full of bikers. And she not only has a way with a gun, but an ingrained set of reflexes under fire that hint at — though do not reveal — a secret life of which even Pete isn’t aware. (Stoic and quiet, Pete himself is carefully crafted. As Celine says at one point, “‘This’ — she motioned to Pete — ‘I mean he, is Pete, my Watson and my husband. Actually, I may be his Watson, but no one would know because he doesn’t say much.’ ”)

Celine is a novel readers will happily disappear into, anchored by a powerful, complex central character. Finishing the book, though, will leave one conflicted internally: it works as well as it does because it is singular, a standalone novel without the weight of a series, a unique work. And yet, one can’t help but want more.