Turpentine, by Spring Warren, $14. With its rich stew of characters, “Turpentine” is a picaresque novel, reminiscent of a tale that might have come from Charles Dickens.
The story begins in 1871 when young Edward Turrentine Bayard III — Ned — comes west from Connecticut expecting to regain his health at a sanitarium but finds himself skinning buffalo on the Nebraska plains.
The overseer, Tilfert Slade, a “huge man with tree trunk limbs,” who has an eye on Ned’s landlady, does his best to initiate the young man into the ways of the West, a life Ned would quit in an instant if he weren’t short on money and had the ability to ride a horse.
When a scout, Tennessee, offers him a job driving a supply wagon, Ned balks until he realizes he would now have transportation to visit beautiful Lillian, whom he has just met. Along with the supply wagon comes a Percheron by the name of Chin to pull it.
The giant animal’s slow pace is pokey enough for Ned to draw his “scientific” sketches while he works. And he takes a grudging liking to the animal.
All seems to be going well when Ned receives bad news that the family fortune is gone. The real world has caught up with him, and he decides to return to Connecticut to make his way in the scientific world under the tutelage of a Yale professor who has shown interest in his sketching ability.
Once in New Haven, Ned must live in a boarding house that caters to those from a decidedly seamy side of life. Among his new friends are a determined young woman named Phaegin, who works in a cigar store, and Curly, a 14-year-old miner.
When his professional life at the university takes an unexpected turn for the worst, Ned is forced to pick up stakes once again, this time in the company of Phaegin and the boy. Together, they head west. Each day is filled with new adventures and tests to survive as they make their way from boxcars to the teeming slums of Chicago to the desolate western plains, always barely one step ahead of the law.
Author Spring Warren delivers a delightfully unpredictable yet poignant story filled with marvelous characters caught in a life seldom of their own making.
Endings, by Barbara Bergin, $28.95. “Endings” opens on a rain-slick night as Leslie Cohen, a widow and a physician driving to another temporary job in Abilene, Texas, rear-ends a horse trailer. She and the driver, Regan Wakeman, exchange names and insurance cards. The police arrive and an officer finally takes her to her motel.
The next morning she learns not just the details of her new job, which involve filling in for Doc Hawley, soon to undergo an operation for colon cancer, but also that the man she crashed into the night before owns a large construction company in town.
But Leslie, who has put aside her private life, shrugs off this information and throws herself into her new assignment. The busier she is the less time she has to dwell on her husband’s death and her own loneliness. This time, because the fill-in job is longer than most of her recent assignments, she has the chance not only to assist in surgery but also to take charge in the emergency room.
There, she happens to meet up with Regan Wakeman again. Against her better judgment, they make a date for dinner. In her professional life, she gets to know Doc Hawley and his wife, and they become friends. Steadily, the distance she has carefully kept from those around her begins to erode.
The author, a practicing orthopedic surgeon in Austin, Texas, does a fine job of bringing her knowledge and understanding to the characterization of Leslie Cohen as a physician. The result, however, is a novel whose strength is not its story but the demanding reality behind it.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes regularly on new regional fiction.
