Turpentine
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A young man’s misadventures from privileged Connecticut to the Wild West and back make for “an entertaining romp through the American 1870s” (Publishers Weekly).
Sick and restless, Edward Turrentine Bayard III leaves his Connecticut home in 1871 to recover in a private sanitarium out west. But when his destination proves to be nothing more than a rickety outpost on the Nebraskan plains, he becomes a buffalo skinner instead. After returning East, Ned teams up with a lady cigar-roller named Phaegin, and Curly, a fourteen-year-old coal miner. But soon enough, the newfound trio is wrongly accused of triggering a bomb at a labor rally, and they must flee.
With a Pinkerton agent following their every move, the winsome ne’er-do-wells embark on a circuitous escape through northern outposts into Indian country, past the slums of Chicago, and into the boundless Great Plains. En route they become witness to the transformation and growing pains of a burgeoning nation in this comic, picaresque, and prescient look at the growth of an individual and a country.
“Warren knows how to spin a tale.” —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This highly episodic picaresque manages to outlast a generic, disorganized plot to emerge as an entertaining romp through the American 1870s. For the most part, Warren's debut follows the youthful adventures of Edward Turrentine Bayard III, who has left his upper-class Connecticut family and headed to frontier Nebraska for his health. In short order, he becomes a buffalo skinner, learns to ride and shoot, and is smitten by the beautiful and poetic Lill Martine. She has other ideas, and Ned, crestfallen but undaunted in his devotion, takes a job offer from a paleontologist back East. There, he meets Phaegin, an attractive, streetwise dance hall girl, and more or less adopts a juvenile delinquent named Curly. Curly's mischief soon has the trio accused of anarchy, theft and murder, and they flee across the continent for their lives. A series of improbable coincidences and misadventures follow, involving wealthy entrepreneurs, Mormons, Indians and a variety of rustic frontier types. There's no shortage of sudden death and grim gore, all of which remains comically on the surface. Characters come and go, often violently. But astonishingly, the sweetness of the story keeps it afloat.
