Missy, by Chris Hannan, $24. Missy is liquid opium. It is also the nickname of Dol McQueen, the irresistible 19-year- old heroine of this first novel. From the instant she appears on stage, Missy grabs the reader’s attention and never lets go.
Dol — or Missy, because liquid opium is her drug of choice — is a “flash-girl” in a San Francisco whorehouse. Her mother abandoned her when she was 15 but has an annoying habit of reappearing. The solution, Dol decides, is to move, and she takes off to Nevada Territory to fleece the silver miners.
The trip excites her. Once there, the noise in the mines underground matches the high life in the saloons. Unfortunately, she has failed to escape her mother.
Even so, Missy’s life is settling in nicely when Jim Duffield, a slick-looking wheeler-dealer, walks into the saloon. Duffield is married, but he is liberal in his thinking about that arrangement. One night he and Missy come to her mother’s aid when a ruckus occurs, but not because she loves her mother. If she had any redeemable qualities she’d pawn them, Missy believes. “But she ain’t sneaky and she ain’t dumb,” Missy says.
The police are never far away. On the take or not, Duffield advises saloon customers, who include a dangerous gang of kids, to show the cops respect. Middle- aged, underpaid and married as they are, it is best not to try their patience. So when Dol discovers a stash of opium, she decides she would be smart to leave town and flee across the southwestern desert.
She encounters a gang of kids, Native American mule thieves and Civil War renegades. Missy takes it all in stride. “There’s no quit in me,” she says, “or I would have given up when I was ten.”
This is a delightful story, but if there is a fault to find, it is the occasional observations that go beyond even Missy’s wisdom.
Names on a Map, by Benjamin Alire Saenz, $14.95. Author Benjamin Alire Saenz, who came of age listening to the arguments about the Vietnam War, uses his novel to examine that troublesome period when sense of duty often vied with the reality of inequality.
In the 1960s, three generations of the Espejo family live in El Paso, Texas, along the Mexican border. Originally from Mexico, the family now lives together in comfortable circumstances. Octavio, the head of the household, comes from a once-prominent family in Mexico that lost its land and standing during the revolution and fled to El Paso. The children were all born in the United States.
The men in the second generation served in Korea. Now there is Vietnam. The boys all think about it. Adam is the first to enlist in the Marines. “If you don’t belong to your country, where do you belong?” he says. But one day his brother, Gustavo — Gus — who fixes cars, shows up at work, wearing a black armband, he says to protest the war.
Each family member’s story unfolds — some only a few pages long, others at some length. Lourdes, mother and wife, remembers Mexico, fears for her children and cares for Rosario, the matriarch. Xochil, who was born within minutes after her brother, resents the war, believes it is defining her as well as her brothers and her entire generation.
The war becomes the family’s center. Among its women, opinion swings from ignorance to pride to resentment. Abe tells himself a person has to stand up to evil and is the next to sign up. Once overseas, Adam endures the cold of the perpetual rain as he tries to deal with his fear, careful that his letters home say nothing of the reality. Back in El Paso, their brother, Gus, weighs the daily news against the letters and his own fear, and grapples with the consequences he could face if he defects to his grandparents’ native land.
Though the nearly constant switch from one character’s viewpoint to another can tend to confuse, “Names on a Map” is a thoughtful, heartfelt examination of the disruptive and tragic effects wars, particularly Vietnam, have on family — not only on those who fight them but also on those left behind, and those who sometimes choose a different course.
Sybil Downing of Boulder is a novelist who writes regularly about new regional fiction.
