Trotter Ross

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 4 JAN 1999

First published by a small press in 1981, this archetypal coming-of-age novel shows its title character stumbling and lurching toward manhood against the stark western landscapes of 1950s Texas. Trotter is the orphaned scion of an oil family, raised by stepparents and haunted, in his late teens, by recurring visions of his dead grandfather Ross, whose legendary savage lifestyle offers one masculine role model for Trotter to follow. His other model comes from his doting Uncle Morrison--refined, cultured, sexually ambiguous--and in his own quiet way just as iconoclastic as Ross. Trotter emulates both of these men: he readily engages in fistfights, but his witty banter proves him smarter than most of those around him. Though confused about manhood and sexual identity, Trotter's self-image is bolstered when he wins the love of Maya, a beautiful lifeguard engaged to a college football star. In fits and starts, the episodic plot takes Trotter through some mythic coming-of-age rituals: he tries peyote, escapes to the wilderness and eats the raw trout he catches himself. But archetypes can devolve quickly into caricatures, and Hoggard (Elevator Man) is at his best when he avoids such abstract mythmaking in favor of his precise physical observations. There are loving depictions of the wide-open West, with deer jumping over barbed wire fences and a showdown between a group of teenage boys and a hapless skunk. Trotter himself borders on caricature, with his cigar chomping and resolutely silent fistfights, but in some scenes--including one in which he picks out the melodies to opera arias on his harmonica--he comes to life as a smart and troubled young man trying to establish himself even as he hurtles toward a dangerous, climactic confrontation.