Russell Martin's remarkable first novel brings to mind the wonderful early books of Larry McMurtry, wherein the gorgeous but unforgiving landscape of the American West is evoked as powerfully and majestically as the characters who inhabit it. Martin's narrator is Jack Healy, a decent man struggling to make sense of the cosmos, and to define his place in it. Growing up in Durango, Colorado, the son of an Episcopal priest, Healy dreamed...