The Bronc People

This novel belongs to an interesting subgenre: Southwest Beatnik. (Are there any other examples?) William Eastlake had fiction published in the Evergreen Review with the likes of Kerouac, Burroughs et.al...he has an intimate geographical understanding of the Indian Country he writes of so beautifully here, but his style is also allied with that era's beatnik fiction of the coasts, notably Richard Brautigan and Fielding Dawson ...though writing of deserts here, he is somehow still able to place the reader into that green tranquil beat world that existed for a few short years before the Vietnam War. There is a vibration which is most keenly comparable to a work such as Brautigan's 'Confederate General from Big Sur', an evocation of a world which now seems to us, in the light of the past generation's events, to be an alternate universe...where the characters,no matter what their material struggles may be, seem to have total freedom to engage in their true vocations, abstract philosophy and self-realization. They have material wants, but somehow these wants become background radiation, so to speak....could this vibration be economically rooted in a new comfort level not seen before the post-WWII era...in any case these precious circuits were soon overloaded and fried in the intense heat of the protest years that followed, leaving only the few treasured documents of which this novel is one, and one of the best.

I stumbled across this in the "local books" section of a used bookstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is the second of a trilogy, known as "The Bowman Family Trilogy," and published separately as "Lyric of the Circle Heart". (The first of the trilogy is "Go in Beauty" and the third is "Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-six Horses".) I probably should read the entire trilogy before commenting on "The Bronc People", but I am so taken with the novel, and there is such a shocking dirth of other reviews, that no time should be lost in extolling its merits. The book is set in Northwestern New Mexico, near and on the Navajo "Checkerboard" Reservation. Without stopping to give detailed verbal pictures of the landscape, Eastlake nonetheless evokes a realistic visceral feel for the region. ("You will never have forgotten a long day in northern New Mexico. It is not a memory you lose easily. There are all the strange sights and sounds and sudden beauty.") Most of the action takes place around 1935-1950, and it centers on episodes in the lives of Sant Bowman, son of hard-scrabble Anglo parents who are moderately successful in carving out a ranching livelihood in land not suited for such ranches, and his black adopted brother Alastair Benjamin. (How Alastiar becomes an orphan and then is adopted into the Bowman family is at first a mystery to both Sant and the reader, but is gradually revealed to both in the course of the novel.) In growing up from boys to young men, Sant and Alastair encounter world-weary and oft-drunk Navajos, a daredevil rodeo bronc-rider, a superannuated and grizzled mountainman, animal bounty hunters, and a disillusioned missionary from New England to the Navajo ("A missionary can be living among one million heathen in New York City and yet they come out here to convert fifty Indians."). Much of the book is driven by the friction between cultures, and throughout it is clear that the author's sympathies are with the native Americans. Yet Eastlake presents all his characters -- Indian, Anglo, and Black -- with compassion and humor. He employs an unusual (and, in my experience, unique) narrative voice. The action frequently is propelled forward at a rapid pace by means of dialogue. The novel is especially marked by its humor -- often sardonic, sometimes "laugh-out-loud" funny, and occasionally sophomoric -- but it also is sprinkled with historical tidbits and wry philosophical observations. An example of the former: the word "cowboy" was first used by revolutionary patriots during the American Revolution to refer to Tory marauders who plundered their livestock (How's that for irony? -- cowboys derive from Tories!). Two examples of the latter: (a) Alastair's comment that "the universe is not moral, that things fall upon the just and the unjust equally almost"; and (b) the mountainman's rueful and belated realization that "We made the wrong arrangements. We fought the wrong people. We should have joined the Indians, fought

This book is available as a part of "Lyric of the Circle Heart: The Bowman Family Trilogy", published in 1996. Three Eastlake novels, "Go in Beauty", "The Bronc People", and "Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-six Horses" comprise the trilogy. *****