When the latest Francine Prose book proved so awful (poorly written, trite dialogue, uninteresting characters, a waste of money, and the good reviews only show that the book publishing industry is a very cosy business) that I didn't want to keep reading - didn't even want to bother taking the book back with me in my space-constrained carry-on, in fact - and found myself without a book for the plane rides back east from Southern California, I made my way to the amazing open-air Bart's Books in Ojai and got, in a completely different genre, "The Painter" by Peter Heller. With that book I had a different problem: it was so good I finished it right before I boarded the red-eye from San Francisco to Newark.
The story, in a nutshell, is that the narrator, a painter (the rugged individualist type, not the sensitive soul type) moved to Taos, NM after the death of his teenage daughter - and only child - in a drug deal gone bad and gets in trouble when he punches a poacher he finds beating a little horse on a day he's out flyfishing. Later he runs into the poacher again and kills him, which triggers a manhunt led by the poacher's brother and an acolyte through the Santa Fe and Taos region. (Earlier the man served one year in state prison for shooting at a man who had insinuated he'd do certain things to the man's daughter, when she was still alive, and had apparently escaped jail for similar charges before, so the narrator has a history of violence he can't control when he thinks it's for a good cause.) There's also a romance with the woman who serves as a model for his paintings, and some digressions about the paintings themselves, but really what kept me reading was the storyline about the manhunt.
In fact, what kept me reading is the voice of the narrator telling us about the manhunt, a voice that grabs you and don't let you go until you've reached the end, although I will admit I skipped some of the paragraphs about paintings and other digressions that interrupted the flow of the story. I rarely find a novel that is truly a page-turner, although the expression is overused in the industry, and while Heller unabashedly uses all the tricks to gear his story toward the widest-possible audience (is it a New York Times bestseller yet?) -- combining the art scene of New Mexico with a flyfishing, tough guy, violence (a murder) with sensitiveness (for the daughter and the little horse), a touch of love (for the model) with lots of brotherhood stuff (his helping out his neighbor when the brother of the dead poacher sets fire to the neighbor's barn where the little horse is recovering, he giving a painting to the acolyte for their first meeting and later saving the acolyte's life) -- sometimes you just have to enjoy a good read, even when - don't let yourself be fooled by the Knopf logo - it is determinedly commercial fiction.
I loved the voice of the narrator, who has for once a voice that doesn't sound like a million other people's voices - he tends to speak in fragments, just like when you speak to someone and correct yourself mid-sentence or talk and talk and talk as if you hadn't spoken to someone in a while. The book is a bit "over the top" at times - Heller clearly wants the book to be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster and pre-chewed the scenes for the screenwriters, with very strong visual elements, especially during the shooting at the collector's house and the car chase scenes, which basically scream "make a movie out of me!"
And frankly, worse things would happen than turning this book into a movie: it is a beautiful story, a little too clean-cut but perfect for Hollywood where the good characters are never too flawed and the bad ones never have too many redeeming qualities. Thankfully, Heller manages to stay on the right side of caricature, and he delivers what should be one of the best and most spellbinding novels of the season. Five stars out of five.
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