A Desert of Pure Feeling
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the writer whose voice Carolyn See has characterized as one of the strangest, most distinguished in American fiction writing today ("There is really nothing to compare her with, except, maybe, the austere beauty of a Japanese rock garden"), here is a richly dramatic novel about a woman struggling to make peace with herself as a mother, a lover, an artist, and a friend.
Lucy Patterson has just encountered her past in the person of a man whom she has not seen for twenty-five years. Dr. Carlos Cabrera saved the life of her infant son, and it was her love for him that compelled her to end her marriage -- the first moment in an arc of emotional turbulence and upheaval that has since defined her existence. Her past having caught up with her, Lucy has come to an isolated motel in the desert outside Las Vegas to write out her life, reexamine it, and, she hopes, find its calm center. It's a journey she is determined to make alone, but in the next room is a young woman -- a single mother, stripper, and prostitute panicked about her own life -- whom Lucy finds she cannot, and finally does not want to, ignore. A fiercely odd pair, they nonetheless become indispensable to each other in navigating the emotional terrain of their past and in finding, separately and together, clear paths into the future.
A Desert of Pure Feeling is the finest work we have yet seen from a writer whose gifts, at once lyrical and tough-minded, become vividly apparent in this penetrating and compelling story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Lucy Patterson, the 45-year-old narrator, tells us that once she wanted to write a huge historical narrative but that "the harder I tried to focus on my grand themes... the more personal were the events, the smaller the ideas, that overtook my imagination." It's an apt description of Freeman's effort here. The novel moves between the present, in which Lucy tells her story from the Las Vegas motel to which she has retreated in the wake of a traumatic disaster, and Lucy's past, mostly as it concerns Dr. Carlos Cabrera, a Guatemalan doctor who saved the life of Lucy's young son and with whom Lucy had a formative affair. When Carlos shows up, after all these years, aboard a cruise ship on which Lucy is traveling, they rekindle their affair. The disaster strikes after another passenger forces from Carlos a revelation about his youth in Nazi Germany. This in turn forces from Freeman some awkward and dramatically flat exposition about the tricky nature of moral judgment. Back in Vegas, Lucy is drawn closer--emotionally and erotically--to Joycelle, a vulnerable hooker and stripper. Freeman (Set for Life; Chinchilla Farm) would have done better to confine herself to a deeper juxtaposition of Lucy's two loves--the refined, sophisticated older Carlos and the vulgar, semiliterate younger Joycelle. Lucy's story is a moving, deliberate meditation on love that is at its best when simply mapping the interior lives of its characters. It falters when Freeman throws in Nazis, Mormons and Guatemalan terrorism, elements that provide a false, often melodramatic sense of scope to what is, in the end, a very intimate novel.
