Stone Cowboy - Softcover

Jacobs, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1569471363 ISBN 13: 9781569471364

Publisher: Soho Press, 2003

Synopsis

Burnt out and afraid to feel, Roger is the stone cowboy, an American expatriate reluctantly in Bolivia and trying to get out any way he can. Possible plans for escape include duping a fellow gringo named Agnes who is searching for her brother. She needs Roger's worldly know-how, he needs her money. Roger signs on as her unlikely guide through a horrifying Third World gauntlet as they pursue the magician brother, who dabbles in Russian roulette for amusement while looking for a mystical source of real magic no longer available in the First World. The brother also seems to have taken up residence with an international hood who shares his interest in how things disappear. Meanwhile, Agnes and Roger find that their wounded spirits become agents of redemption for each other.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Jacobs is a career foreign-service officer. He and his family have lived in Turkey, Paraguay, and Spain, and recently returned to the Washington, D.C., area.

From Kirkus Reviews

A burnt-out American doper, fresh from a Bolivian prison, starts out conning a naive social worker by helping her find her magician brother--and ends up conducting her on a tour of the hell that is the coca trade, while gradually recovering his humanity. Ringing new changes on the legacy of Chandler and Traven, this first novel by Jacobs (stories: A Cast of Spaniards, not reviewed), a longtime foreign-service functionary, matches noirish Roger, the Stone Cowboy, whose drug abuse has shorted out body and soul, with Agnes, a prissy Yankee social worker who's come in search of her magician brother Jonathan, now the pet of a major cocaine dealer. Narrating in the louche voice familiar to drug writers from Robert Stone to Jay McInerney, Roger takes Agnes backstage in the so- called war on drugs. Of course, the only way to get to Jonathan-- who seems to be seeking the real magic that fled North America with the coming of the Industrial Revolution--is to descend, and so our odd couple will hear Zen wisdom from the mouths of peasants, go for a wild ride with a mad revolutionary radio-broadcaster, work as forced laborers smashing coca leaves in a jungle pit for a vicious middleman, undergo interrogation and beatings by DEA henchmen--and finally travel with the brother and the druglord to the top of an Andean peak, where the last real magician lives. There, Jonathan will get his wish (he becomes a bird as the druglord executes him), and, like the Cowardly Lion, Roger will get to ask the god La Pachamama for his own wish: ``Give me back my heart.'' An unusual love story, to say the least--a little bit as if The African Queen were mixed with Panic in Needle Park--and an impressive debut from a writer with a generous imagination and a daring, if deeply weird, sense of character and fate. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1569471363
• ISBN 13: 9781569471364
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304