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Debut novelist David Anthony Durham mines new territory in the literature of the American West with his searing portrait of a young black man's coming of age on a Kansas homestead in Gabriel's Story, a fast-paced, historically accurate adventure story in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy.
Bob Minzesheimer
Gabriel Story, a wise and beautifully written debut novel by David Anthony Durham. Its a Western adventure with overtones of the Old Testament.
— USA Today
Patrick Henry Bass
David Anthony Durham makes a sensational debut with Gabriel's Story, a lush and atmospheric historical novel that races the unforgettable odyssey of a prairie family in the mid-nineteenth century.
— Essence
THE LITERAL American West is the condo-stacked Pacific coast, yet there remains in our continental consciousness a mythical "West," a vast open space where imagination can roam. These two first novels are Westerns: Gabriel's Story a cowboy tale about a post-Civil War black youth who journeys to the heart of whiteness in the Arizona desert; America's Children a pioneer story about a World War II-era Jewish scientist—Robert Oppenheimer—who fathered the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and exploded it at White Sands. David Anthony Durham and James Thackara are Americans living in Europe, and their books provide a European critique of New World innocence, Americans' hope that goodness can make even a Western desert bloom. Both novelists reshape pre-American genres—the heroic quest, the tragic fall—to give their densely historical fictions a timeless quality.
When Durham's Gabriel is fifteen, his mother and stepfather take him from a comfortable life in Baltimore to a sod hut on the Kansas plain, where the boy attacks the earth with an ax and his bare hands. Given the chance to escape farming with a band of cowboys, Gabriel and his young friend James join up. The group is led by Marshall, a fast-talking white man, and Caleb, his silent half-black half-brother. Not long into their trek toward Texas, Gabriel realizes the cowboys are horse thieves, who turn into rapists and murderers. Unable to leave the ironically named Marshall and his gang, Gabriel and James are pursued across western borders for their presumed complicity in the gang's crimes and for their color.
Because the novel is titled Gabriel's Story, it's no surprisethat Gabriel ultimately escapes the outlaws, makes a heroic journey home and tells part of his tale to his family. But Durham knows evil is not shed by telling, so he brings Marshall and Caleb to Kansas, the hunted now hunting Gabriel. Pervaded by Biblical allusions, including Gabriel's name, the novel ends with an Old Testament rigor and righteousness.
Durham has an ancient Israelite's knowledge of the desert, its mirages and badlands, beauty and threat. His language is King James plain—and poetic. The plot of Gabriel's Story is somewhat schematic in its stages of departure, initiation and return, and while Marshall sounds more like Flannery O'Connor's theological misfits than a cowpoke, Durham does not romanticize the West. Nor does he demonize it. His West is a testing ground where human emotions as old as humanity reveal themselves. Although Gabriel's Story has been compared to Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, Durham is more like William Faulkner on horseback. Rather than McCarthy's sometimes hardwired aggression, Durham focuses on acculturated racism—against Indians, blacks, Mexicans. The result is a morally complicated, socially nuanced story of American violence and its discontents. Told with great economy and restraint, it is a very promising debut.
Kirkus Reviews
Intensely dramatic debut, set in Kansas and points west and southwest during the 1870s: a direct homage to Cormac McCarthy's highly praised fiction (both his Blood Meridian and the recent Border Trilogy) but also an original work of high distinction. The protagonist, teenaged Gabriel Lynch, arrives from the East with his widowed mother Eliza and younger brother Ben at a train station where they're met by her husband-to-be, Solomon Johns, a farmer who had been Eliza's first love before her life with the boys' father, a prosperous middle-class Baltimore mortician. Gabriel resents the opportunities lost, and the hard life they're introduced to, and eagerly leaves"home," joining another black boy (James) to ride with a group of cattle drovers. A bloodthirsty odyssey ensues, as the gang's embittered leader Marshall Hogg (an amoral fatalist straight out of Dostoevsky) directs his minions to steal, rape, and murder, ever moving on, through Mexico, Arizona, and the Rockies, en route to California—away from the avengers who slowly, methodically pursue them. Durham tells this story with great skill, weaving together a beautifully plotted central action and extended italicized passages detailing the embattled growth to manhood of the stoical Ben and the steely determination of a bereaved Mexican soldier who'll follow Hogg to hell and back. Meanwhile, he also depicts with hallucinatory vividness the enigmatic figure of Hogg's second-in-command Caleb, a black drover who never speaks, and harbors a terrible secret indeed. The only flaw in the narrative is Durham's inexplicable tendency toward an abstract rhetoric clearly influenced by both the aforementioned McCarthy and hismajorinfluence,Faulkner, which often produces moments of ludicrous and vague grandiosity (e.g., watching Caleb,"Gabriel thought him some dark figure of the apocalypse"). Such moments aside, Gabriel's Story grates on the reader's nerves unerringly, and frequently rises to real grandeur. A brilliant example of how to assimilate and transmute powerful literary influence. And what a movie this dark, haunting tale will make. Author tour
From the Publisher
Wise and beautifully written.”–USA Today
“Artistically impressive and emotionally satisfying, a serious work that heads off in exhilarating directions.”–The New York Times Book Review
“Sweeps the reader up into a fascinating, Oz-like whirlwind of language.”–San Francisco Chronicle
“Moving. . . . The moral gravity of Durham’s narrative is offset by his attentiveness to the primacy of nature in the Western landscape.” –The New Yorker
“Durham captures with exquisite precision the isolation, loneliness and cruelty of life in the vastness of the West . . . . The reader turns the last page with regret at the journey’s end.” –The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
OCT/NOV 06 - AudioFile
This debut novel delivers a fresh view of black pioneers, refugees of Reconstruction, on the Western frontier. Tony Penny portrays main character Gabriel Lynch vividly, making him feel human, immediate, and palpable. Seeking adventure, Gabriel and friend James join a band of cowboys led by horse thief, rapist, and murderer Marshall and his half-black brother, Caleb. Penny evokes the youthful emotions, recklessness, and repressed desires of the characters using changes in tone and pace, as well as accents and regional dialects. Penny’s understated yet professional style helps mitigate the story’s violence and personalize the coming-of-age aspect of this remarkable adventure. S.C.A. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
