San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Debut novel a noir meditation on female friendship
In “A Prayer For Travelers,” the traditional missingwoman noir is told from the perspective of a young girl searching for her best friend. An exploration of the intimate and powerful friendships between women is at the novel’s center. Opening with 17yearold Cale’s realization that her friend Penny is nowhere to be found, leaving behind an empty trailer and a troubling amount of hidden cash, the story then bounds forward and back in time through scrambled chapters (they start with 31), illuminating both the central question and the cascading mysteries of their young lives.
Prior to Penny’s disappearance, the most significant event in Cale’s life comes when she is a baby, left at a hospital by her mother. Hours later, she’s taken home by her gruff grandfather, Lamb, a widower who has long ago sunk into the trappings of a bachelor existence and struggles to incorporate the needs of a child into his lifestyle. Cale and Lamb build an unconventional but loving parentchild relationship in a tiny Nevada desert town called Pomoc. “In all the important ways, I was of him. I wore his socks, five sizes too large, and drank the dregs of his coffee from the cups left carelessly unattended throughout the house,” Cale explains.
Though she reveres Lamb, Cale bears the wounds of a parentless child. “It was sorrow cracking me open, a fissure I couldn’t explain, a yearning to something or someone I didn’t know. Can you tell me what a mother is? Nothing you can measure,” she says. While Catherine, Lamb’s late wife and Cale’s grandmother, is alluded to, Cale’s mother, though often referenced, remains unnamed. She does not know who her father is, leaving her ethnicity a
A Prayer for Travelers
mystery.
Cale makes it through school remaining withdrawn and friendless, afraid that any human connection will lessen her bond with her grandfather. After graduation, she starts working as a waitress at a diner frequented by truckers, where opioids are an unavoidable form of currency. She forges an electric connection with Penny Reyes, a high school classmate with her own battles. Penny has spent her teenage years enmeshed in a tightknit group of girls, and Cale seems surprised by her attention.
“You’re a loner, so I’m going to tell you how this works, okay? When people spend a lot of time together, they get to talking,” Penny tells her. Penny is teaching Cale how to exist around people, but Cale is offering her someone to confide in about her desire to leave and start a different kind of life, someone who doesn’t know her family and is naive about the darkness that has crept into her life.
The winding path of the timeline, with chapters that careen back and forth rapidly, propels the story and amplifies the suspense. We quickly see that Cale is coping with the realization that Lamb is seriously ill at the time that she discovers Penny is gone. The combination sets her adrift and awakens a new appetite for taking risks. She is the only one searching for Penny, and her quest takes her on a winding path through the Southwest, coming up against both the police and dangerous, shadowy figures. In the background is her struggle to come to grips with the idea of life without the only family she’s ever known, and to reconcile the Penny she loves with the darker side that she’s beginning to uncover. In piecing together the mystery, Cale opens the door to a world of darkness that Penny has shielded her from and faces realities that age her dramatically.
Despite her absence, Penny is a fully realized character whose perfectly rendered dialogue and mannerisms create an indelible image. She feels fully alive through Cale’s recollections, and we see that Cale’s quest to find her is also a quest to understand someone who, despite their closeness, remained a cipher.
From the opening of the book, Cale bears a black eye that goes unexplained until a shockingly violent incident is unraveled over the course of several chapters. It is brutal and terrifying, and at once brings Penny, Cale and their bond into perfect focus. Many women will find parallels between the scene and experiences of their own lives. It is in the exploration of Penny and Cale’s disparate reactions to the violation that “A Prayer for Travelers” is at its most breathtaking.
This is the first novel from Ruchika Tomar, who is a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford. She has done justice to a portrait of two young women coming of age in a world full of hard men and has created a world where the brutality of the landscape is matched by the circumstances that her characters live in: babies abandoned, children left to raise themselves and men who circle young girls like prey.
For Penny and Cale, violence looms at all corners, and in Tomar’s compassionate rendering, they are imbued with strength, fortitude and fierceness. The landscape of Pomoc, with the Nevada highway, lonely trailer parks, desolate bars and haunted casinos, has a vivid quality. You can feel the dust, the desolation and the desperation of both the land and its occupants. “A Prayer for Travelers” is as much a story of the American West as it is a meditation on the lives of young women.
Adrienne Gaffney is a freelance writer and reporter in New York. She contributes to the Wall Street Journal, Billboard and Vogue Business, among others.