Cutting Stone - Hardcover

Burroway, Janet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039559300X ISBN 13: 9780395593004

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992

Synopsis

At first apalled by the Arizona desert town of Bowie, transplanted easterner Eleanor Poindexter is soon seduced by its primitive landscape and its inhabitants. By the author of The Buzzards and Raw Silk. Tour.

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Reviews

Burroway's ( The Buzzards ) startling new novel takes up the taming of the American frontier--a classic theme to which she brings a wholly fresh outlook. While most writers and legend-mongers depict the West as the terrain of limitless promise, she charts a land of bankrupt dreams. Her characters do not stake their claims; instead, they find themselves endlessly alienated, mocked by the very notion of home. In 1914, Eleanor Poindexter, a young society woman from Baltimore, accompanies her tubercular husband to Bowie, Ariz., where the dry heat restores his health but singes Eleanor's willingness to honor conventions. Her affair with a married rancher produces tragic consequences worthy of a Greek drama, a development Burroway offsets with an acutely funny story line involving a Bowie native who is proud to have been swept up by Pancho Villa's revolutionary forces in Mexico. Fugitives and exiles, townsfolk and Mexican soldiers convene in Bowie for a finale loosely rooted in history. Burroway's uncanny balance of various tones and her hard-edged view of American aspirations gain even more strength from her unflinching observations--dust storms, schoolyard cruelties and the drowning of kittens receive the same precise descriptions as do landscapes and passions. Fierce and unyielding, this is the prose of a pioneer.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The author of Opening Nights (1985), Raw Silk (1977--a National Book Award runner-up), etc., evokes a Baltimore society woman's coming of age in early-1900's Arizona in this vividly realized epic tale--utterly captivating, and among the author's best work. The pampered wife of a Baltimore banking executive and daughter of a wealthy Catholic businessman, young Mrs. Eleanor Poindexter was born and bred to entertain, manage an extensive household, and surround herself with beautiful things. Decidedly content with her role--despite the fact that she doesn't love her husband, Laurel (who, in any case, dotes on her)--Eleanor panics when Laurel contracts tuberculosis and must transfer posthaste to a bank in hot, healing, primitive Arizona. Initially, Eleanor finds herself even more outrageously bored by tiny, provincial Bowie than she had feared, but as her life begins to intertwine with the lives of such eccentric dreamers as an impoverished marble-quarry owner; a spinster schoolteacher who refuses to marry the town's richest man; a Mexican maid determined to live a lady's life in California; a derelict miner who runs off to serve Pancho Villa; and the Chinese son of a former railway worker who wanders the desert in search of himself--Eleanor's own character is soon stripped, twisted, and redefined by the unforgiving desert. With her sharp- eyed, pitiless evocations of Eleanor's battles with alcoholism, adultery, and self-pity, Burroway creates a virtual Emma Bovary of the West--a memorable character who finally triumphs in an unsympathetic world. Great, wide-screen entertainment in the McMurtry tradition. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Duty compels Eleanor Pointdexter to accompany her tubercular husband, a banker, to Bowie, Arizona, in 1913. Contemptuous of the desert town and its people, she seeks solace in drink and an affair with a local rancher that ends badly in innocent death and suffering. Eleanor comes close to a complete breakdown, hanging onto sanity only through her plans to convert a deserted mission into a house. Meanwhile, the brother of Eleanor's lover and his Chinese-American friend are ensnared in the Mexican Revolution. Their stories of allegiances offered and betrayals suffered provide a masculine counterpoint to Eleanor's saga. All of the characters seek to carve out meaningful lives, both physically and spiritually, from surrounding and often overwhelming environments. This fine historical novel, with its richly textured evocation of a specific time and place, is also an astute psychological study. For most collections.
- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039559300X
• ISBN 13: 9780395593004
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 404