★ 09/23/2019
In a voice rough as a chainsaw blade and Midwestern as green bean casserole, debut author Gritton chronicles the trip-to-hell-and-back life of the troubled Shelley Cooper. After a fire ravages the mountains in the vicinity of Montgrand, Colo., and most of the construction work dries up, Shelley steals an air compressor from his boss and loses his job. He needs money, same as his weed-growing older brother, Clayton, and his sister, May, who is married to Shelley’s best friend Mike. Clayton’s wife, Nancy, has the same shaking sickness her mother had, and May and Mike’s little daughter, Layla, has cancer: in short, these are folks “whose bad luck run longer than an interstate.” Something deep and unnameable bothers Shelley; he cares an awful lot about Mike, though his discontent mostly seems like a mean streak to others. When Clay starts coming up with mystery money, Shelley becomes suspicious; his brother already spent five years in prison for dealing weed, and Shelley blames this calamity for their mother’s death. Nevertheless, he agrees to deliver Clay’s latest batch of marijuana to Houston, and what happens on this trip is both violently tragic and a twisted sort of redemption. Pitch perfect cadences sing from the mouths of Gritton’s characters, and the author performs skilled loop-de-loops in and out of Shelley’s memories. This auspicious debut marks Gritton as a storyteller to watch. (Nov.)
"From its first assured sentence to its last, Wyoming marks the debut of a gifted storyteller. This is a compassionate novel, for all its violence and despair, an authentic, pitch-perfect portrait of an America too often caricatured or ignored. There are hard truths here, grit and cruelty, but JP Gritton's fine prose is nuanced enough, generous enough, to keep his troubled narrator's humanity, his beating heart, apparent at every turn."
"It’s a powerful story that bridges the specific and the universal, telling us all about ourselves through Shelley Cooper’s stumble and fall."
"Money, family, sex, crime, and mayhem—Wyoming combines the thrill of genre work with the genuine human investigation one hopes to see in a literary novel, and the result is wickedly pleasurable and satisfyingly disturbing. J.P. Gritton’s terse prose about dark-minded men reminds me of the novels of Pete Dexter. This is a marvelous debut and a writer to watch."
"In this throwback to 1980s dirty realism and a novel reminiscent of Frank Bill's fiction, Gritton evokes a beautiful rural landscape and people struggling with the cards they've been dealt, creating a rollicking portrait of a compelling and complicated man who is the product of his choices as much as his circumstances."
"J.P. Gritton's Wyoming is a taut, headlong novel about friendship, brotherhood, and bad decisions—what a man might do for a chance at a different life, and who he might be willing to hurt. Shelley Cooper is a blue-collar antihero, flawed but compelling, in the tradition of Daniel Woodrell or Donald Ray Pollock. When trouble beckons, he just can't help himself, and you can't help but root for him, even as he leaves a trail of wreckage in his wake."
"Gritty, brilliant ... a truly fine and compelling story. Given its dramatic plot, colorful characters and subtle profundities, Wyoming has movie written all over it."
★ 2019-09-02
A series of shocking events, some instigated by the hapless protagonist, shakes up a Colorado family struggling to get by during the economic downturn of the late 1980s.
Things start going south for construction worker Shelley Cooper after a sudden mountain fire consumes the house on which he and his best friend, Mike, were toiling. When his boss rightly suspects he had something to do with an air processor that went missing after the blaze, Shelley loses his job. In desperate financial straits, he agrees to drive a shipment of marijuana to Houston for his brother, Clay, an ex-con who grows his own. "Don't think for a second I was dumb enough to figure it would turn out right," says Shelley, who has the $50,000 payday stolen by a young prostitute he let into his motel room. In fact, nothing ever goes right for him, including his impromptu marriage to his sister's friend Syrena. We are in an alternate Sam Shepard universe in which the battling brothers are too worn down by failure to fight. Moving back and forth in time with extreme subtlety, Gritton erects a penetrating family history of love, loss, loyalty, and betrayal. It takes a great writer to make a character as reprehensible as Shelley not only sympathetic, but almost likable. In fact, Shelley is not so dumb. He wryly reflects on billboards that read "HE IS RISEN" in the face of disaster and tells us how holding $50,000 in cash "feels like a blind rage, like a wolf howling at the moon." How did Shelley became the man he is? In this brilliant debut novel, there are many bread crumbs leading us back to possible answers.
An affecting, richly drawn, darkly humorous novel about grifting siblings, one worse than the other.
