DESERT LIGHT
Chilton Williamson Jr.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987
230 pp., $15.95
Chilton Williamson, Jr., obviously has no desire to bring his fat columns on political and economic reading from the National Review, for which he works as a senior editor, into his other life as the author of fiction. His new book, Desert Light, does, however, reflect the influence of Williamson's New England Calvinist roots. Williamson is descended from vintage New Englanders, and his father, a historian, has written widely on early New England life. Like his Puritan ancestors, Williamson (who now lives in western Wyoming) has made his own pilgrimage into the wilderness, which he reveres for hardening character, and not for refining tastes or developing aesthetic pleasure.
In this murder mystery set in the high plains of western Wyoming, Williamson recounts the physical and spiritual odyssey of a former New York lawyer, Chuck Richardson. Fleeing his life as a socialite, he settles in a sparsely populated cow town, Fontenelle, Wyoming, where he undergoes an identity crisis and spends several years living on the edge of society. Bookish Wyoming lawyer Hal Pearce and his assistant, Mary Elena, bring Richardson back into the fold of human community. The murder trial of Jenny Peterson, a hapless girl whom Richardson helps Pearce defend, continued the process of social reintegration. Though Richardson is initially skeptical about Jenny's innocence, he gradually sympathizes with her as he unravels the skein of circumstantial evidence that only appears to prove her guilt. In the end his sympathy turns to affection, and Richardson ceases to be a loner.
The author pulls off the book in spite of the sometimes unlikely turns in the story. For example, one is never entirely convinced of the plausibility of Richardson leaving a promising legal career or his glamorous wife in the East to become a quasi-derelict in a small Wyoming town. Jenny, the chief female character, who has been framed in a murder after being abducted, also passes through unlikely turns of fortune. Finally, the book closes without a full and satisfactory denouement: that is, without clearing up the legal problems caused by Jenny's and Richardson's unauthorized flight from the still-undecided trial. Having them escape from the scene of the action, and then to a mountain retreat, can be viewed only as an escape from the exigencies of resolving the complications produced by the plot.
Despite the problematic nature of the story, Williamson tells it with flair. He is especially talented at bringing even minor characters to life. A jailer who is marginal to the plot is described in detail as "a dark-completed man with black hair combed to a wave above his forehead and grading to a crew-cut at the back of his skull. He had sad, sloe eyes heavily pouched and a voice that was gentle and full of regret, like that of a man who has given up all hope in his life." Williamson imprints on the reader's consciousness all the major personalities in his murder mystery--Richardson, Pearce, Mary Elena, and Jenny.
His sometimes-labyrinthine descriptive passages tend to recall the syntax of Thomas Wolfe. Like that Southern writer, he piles one phrase relentlessly upon another in order to make a particular scene stand out vividly in
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