Crossing Purgatory

March 25, 2013
This striking tale, a literary western from Schanbacher (Migration Patterns), chronicles one momentous year in the life of a plainsman on the eve of the American Civil War. The young farmer, Thompson Grey, is stricken with grief and guilt after his wife, Rachel, and two sons, Matthew and Daniel, die from diphtheria while he’s away asking his wealthy planter father, Reverend Matthew Grey, for an advance on his inheritance. Leaving his Indiana homestead in the hopes that “he might outpace his grief,” he joins up in Kansas with Captain John Upperdine, who’s guiding a wagon train that includes the pregnant Hanna Light and her son, Joseph, whom Thompson befriends. He and the Lights elect to accept Upperdine’s invitation to stay a while at his Kansas ranch, also farmed by the colorful Benito Ibarra—a relation of Upperdine’s wife, Genoveva. The ranchers survive a ravenous plague of grasshoppers, Hanna gives birth to a daughter she names Destiny, and Thompson experiments with growing a new variety of wheat. They gut it through the harsh winter before Thompson finally comes to terms with his loss at the climax of Schanbacher’s visceral and triumphant saga of the Old West. Agent: Jennifer Carlson, the Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

June 1, 2013

Having buried his wife and two sons, Thompson Grey, a born farmer, walks away from the rich soil of his Indiana holding in May 1858. Filled with grief and regret, he heads west. Though he can barely stand human company, he accepts work with Capt. John Upperdine's Santa Fe Trail wagon train. When anti-abolitionists kill two members of their party, Thompson again finds himself digging graves. By journey's end when he temporarily settles at Upperdine's New Mexico compound, Thompson still battles the numbness of grief but finds some ease working with scythe and plow. His labors help provide for the other settlers, some of them relatives of Upperdine's Hispanic wife. Eventually Thompson must decide whether to commit to desert life, replete with marauding bears, armies of grasshoppers, and much gun violence. VERDICT Schanbacher, whose short story collection, Migration Patterns, won the Colorado Book Award, has produced a deeply human portrait of a man battling for both soul and sanity. Comparing favorably with the fiction of Larry McMurtry, Willa Cather, and Elmer Kelton, this debut is both suspenseful and eloquent. Despite a few minor flaws (jarring plot elements in the final 30 pages and an open ending that seems a bit sudden and unfinished), Schanbacher's novel of the American West should appeal to a large segment of historical fiction readers.--Keddy Ann Outlaw, Houston

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2013
The Purgatory (or Purgatoire) is a river in southern Colorado. The river and the title serve as a metaphor for the odyssey of Thompson Grey, a young Indiana farmer whose efforts to overcome his personal purgatory form the core of this beautifully written novel. In 1858 Grey returns home after an unexpectedly prolonged journey to his father's Kentucky estate. He finds one son dead and his wife and other son in death throes, all from some form of prairie fever. Grey abandons his prosperous farm and begins walking west with his only goal to purge the demons of grief, guilt, and rage that torment him. As he moves west, Grey encounters a variety of circumstances and characters, including a sympathetic wagon master, abolitionists, and pro-slavery border ruffians in Kansas. Stopping in Colorado, his life becomes entwined with other families, each with their own secret sorrows, as they attempt to establish farms. Grey is forced to struggle with both his torments and his humane instincts as he seeks redemption. Schanbacher is a gifted writer whose prose is always elegant, whether describing the land, a winter storm, or the inner life of his characters. This is an intense and emotionally stirring saga.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)