The Sound of the Trees: A Novel

by Robert Gatewood

Overview

In the American Southwest, in 1930, Trude Mason and his mother ride out into the predawn quiet, hoping to escape Trude's brutal, violent father and an equally violent past. They plan on reaching Colorado, a place they believe holds the biggest ranches, the most limitless promise, and lives of the greatest ease. What Trude finds in a small border town in New Mexico, however, is brutality and lawlessness in the form of a cruel, pitiless sheriff and his devoted posse. When they arrest and sentence to death a young woman whose life Trude has saved, he must endure an explosive collision between conscience and self-preservation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312421885
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	06/01/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

Robert Gatewood lives in New Mexico. The Sound of the Trees was a Book Sense 76 pick and is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

Gatewood's subtle, lyrical language gives this first novel a quiet grace....This cowboy tale has all the charms of a horseback ramble.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“This is a remarkable first novel....Gatewood makes us care about his characters and keeps us turning the pages. He shows enormous promise....It will be a pleasure to watch his progress.” —The Denver Post

“[A] remarkable debut novel...A haunting treatise on the conflict between free will and fate in an implacable world. The Sound of the Trees makes real one young man's struggle between personal conscience and survival. Gatewood is a stunning arrival.” —The Santa Fe New Mexican

“Robert Gatewood, in his very fine first novel, has written a timeless tale, eloquent and verbose, vivid as a conflagration.” —The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee)

From the Publisher

Taking its title from a Robert Frost poem, this engrossing, lyrical novel marks the debut of a writer of great promise. Set during the Depression, the narrative follows 18-year-old Trude Mason as he takes his mother and flees on horseback from his abusive alcoholic father, leaving behind their foreclosed New Mexican ranch for the high country of Colorado. After mourning his mother's death from a rattlesnake bite and braving incredible hardships—not the least of which is the approaching winter—Trude is bushwhacked and stabbed by an Englishman traveling with a beautiful black girl who is his captive. Eventually, Trude makes his way to a fledgling frontier town where a sinister mayor holds sway. The ambitious mayor dreams of parlaying the coming of the railroad into the creation of a dominant center of commerce on the western frontier, elevating himself to political prominence. Trude discovers that the girl, Delilah, is also in town and has been jailed for the theft of a rake. His thwarted attempts to free her evolve into a classic David and Goliath struggle. When an Eastern magazine writer comes to town, the power-crazed mayor decides to hang Delilah, sending a message to the world that the town is ruled by law—and by him. The boy's desperate and heroic struggle against time and insurmountable odds invests the denouement with gut-wrenching tension. At times repetitive and marred by off-key imagery—Delilah's hair "fell past her shoulders like nests of stone"; the mayor's boots "sprang from the floor like hand-rubbed coals"—this is nevertheless an uncommonly good first novel, strongly evocative of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.

Publishers Weekly

Adult/High School-This novel of the West dramatically engages readers' senses from its opening lines and, by maintaining tension and momentum, begs to be read without pause. The Robert Frost poem from which the title is taken empathetically foreshadows a young man's longing to "set forth for somewhere," perhaps risking the "reckless choice" in his destiny-defining quest. The journey begins on horseback in Depression-era New Mexico with Trude Mason, a taciturn 18-year-old, and his mother fleeing their impoverished family ranch in predawn desperation to escape the escalating brutality of the young man's father. En route to Colorado, Trude's steadfastness of purpose is tested by personal tragedy and sharpened by the treachery of man. His fate becomes entwined with that of a girl whom fortune has placed in the hands of scoundrels, and whose rescue he champions out of nascent love and a strong code of honor. The Western genre affords a plentiful selection of character types (some memorable, others sketched in less detail than Trude's horse), and a scale of monumental proportions upon which to stage them. Gatewood has created a richly textured tableau threaded with mysticism and sustained by pitch-perfect dialogue laced with quiet dignity. A promising first novel that fans of Cormac McCarthy's work will welcome.-Lynn Nutwell, Fairfax City Regional Library, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

A first novel set in 1930s New Mexico finds an extraordinarily resourceful, but emotionally wounded, 18-year-old on a violent search for moral truth. Fed-up with his drunk, dangerously abusive father, Trude Mason puts his mother on a horse, loads up a mule with provisions, saddles up his trusty mare Triften, and heads for Colorado, where he hopes to find ranch work and make a new start. Though he stares down his knife-wielding father, Trude encounters disaster in the mountains that leaves his mother dead. Later, he witnesses and fails to avenge the murder of a young black girl's child by a gloating, well-dressed Englishman. Left in the mountains for dead, Trude wanders into a nameless town whose peculiar, pathetic Cormac McCarthy-esque denizens are betting that the arrival of a railroad spur will bring them wealth and civilization. Though he finds a friend in the wistful rancher Charlie Ford, Trude sees right through the pretentiousness of most of the townsfolk, finding little to like in the drunken hedonism of a young Italian immigrant John Frank, the gloating bigotry of the Ralston brothers, and the bloviating mayor, who lectures Trude about showing respect for authority. Trude challenges that authority when he discovers that the black girl has been imprisoned unjustly and might even be executed. Trude has to take justice into his own hands, and, in this postmodern updating of the formula western, heroic action leads to nothing but loss and sorrow. Only after returning to the mountains can Trude come to terms with the grief that plagues his heart. Subtly drawn scenes of naturalistic beauty and sudden brutality redeem Gatewood's distracting tendency to write dialogue, some trite (anaging mentor remarks, "pain ain't nothin' more than the memory of comfort"), without quotation marks.

Kirkus Reviews