Looking for Mo

After realizing that he and his friend Mo will never reach the peak of El Capitan, Ray Connelly's world further collapses when Mo accuses him of stealing some unwritten stories, and the conflict is dramatically resolved on the same mountain where it began. A first novel. Tour.

The climb itself, told in vivid detail, and the climax of the book, is absolutely thrilling.... The author seems to belong on the mountain, and can suffer from a tendency to overwrite when he is away from it.

Duane returns to the heights of his nonfiction Lighting Out: A Vision of California and the Mountains, in a shaggy first novel that will do much to justify the ways of crunchy young Bay Area Californians to their indoorsy contemporaries back East. Amateur rock-climber Ray Connelly is hanging out in San Francisco cafes, avoiding rejection slips for his first novel, scoping fellow slacker Fiona (an artist who works in the local supermarket) and missing his adored best friend, Mo Lehrman, who, with typical knight-of-faith gusto, has set out for Baja with a surfboard strapped to his bicycle. Then, all at once, Ray gets together with Fiona, Mo comes back to San Francisco?and Mo's father (a veteran climber with California publishing connections) blasts Ray for stealing his son's stories. The upshot: Ray follows his buddy to Yosemite National Park, where he tries to win back Mo's respect and trust by scaling the dreaded rock face known as El Capitan. Although the subplots never come within shouting distance of each other, the details carry us along like so much climbing tackle: Ray's fondness for Mo overshadows his attraction to Fiona, but the friendship between the two women is romantic enough in its own right. The virtuoso rock-climbing passages never pull their thematic weight but will be dizzying to acrophobic readers; the characters don't show much imagination but do seem unmistakably true to life. If the whole doesn't quite add up to a gripping novel, it does give us an entertaining glimpse at an intelligently Epicurean way of life.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A slim but pleasing meditative account of the Zen of mountain climbing from first-novelist Duane (Caught Inside: A Surfers Year on the California Coast, 1996, etc.). Native San Franciscan Ray, himself a writer, sits at home waiting for his rejected manuscripts to arrive while he dreams of his past adventures with the charismatic Mo. The two pastimes are in fact well connected, for Ray's novel chronicles Mo's wild escapades and parablelike stories, centering on their pursuit of Yosemite's El Capitan. Before Mo manages to return from his latest pilgrimage, Ray meets Fiona, an artist visiting San Francisco for her mother's funeral. Just as the two begin to bond, Mo returns with hopes of attempting 91 Cap again (when last they tried, Ray froze with fear, and they descended before reaching the top). When the men meet up in an industrial loft gorily reminiscent of Survival Research Laboratories, Mo confronts Ray about his book (which had been kept a secret). Ray maintains his innocence, but Mo sees only betrayal: His life stories, he argues, should remain unfinished for as long as hes alive. Mo leaves, and Ray followsa running theme in their friendship. Nevertheless, after Ray gets sidetracked with a hallucinogenic experience at a Dead show, he falls in with Mo once more, and they do attempt the climb. Bad weather, few supplies, and the threats of hypothermia and death are obstacles they face just as a rescue team appears. Duanes story of self-exploration is happily unfettered by New Ageisms, and succeeds partly because it chooses to tackle a small scale, not a big one. Even the nonclimber will get satisfaction from his reflections on the interplay of man and mountain. A nicely balanced work on the age-old quest for enlightenment. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Take two parts Jack Kerouac, one part Jon Krakauer, and one part Jeff Spicoli, and you may end up with the narrator of this enjoyable first novel. Surf bum, writer, and climber Ray Connelly has appropriated his best friend Mo Lehrman's personal anecdotes for a book on the Sierra Nevada. Mo finds out and may be angry, so even meeting dream girl FionaAwhose new artistic outlet is sewingAdoesn't distract Ray from looking for Mo to explain. While searching, Ray careens through California's derivative culture, which comes in for hilarious lumps, from ubiquitous Hare Krishnas to faux-Buddhist rock climbers to a man who vents his grief by planting 1400 bonsai trees. This sweet novel of transition from postadolescence to further postadolescence finishes with a hair-raising adventure in a storm, as Ray and Mo scale El Capitan, an almost sheer rock face in Yosemite, where Ray recently chickened out when they were partway up. By then, it seems unsure whether this is a novel of carpe diem or adventure, but with so much fun going on, you don't care. A book for both the faint of heart and not and for literary collections, to be placed near Kerouac's The Dharma Bums.AHarold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib. of New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.