Melanie Sumner’s The Ghost of Milagro Creek is a novel of New Mexico, a state and state-of-mind close to my heart. The author is from Georgia, but not so long ago she lived in the place she writes about. Like a lot of westerners, I’m used to mis-readings (or more accurately, mis-writings) of my place, and so start a book like Sumner’s ready to raise hell over inconsistencies, flaws, gaps, even lies. However, Milagro Creek is spot-on; Sumner writes about New Mexico with a quiet, comforting authority. I did not doubt her, or doubt her rendering of the place, her characters, the story. So I changed my tack: A writer can come to know a place from the outside-in, and get it right. It’s what writers do best.

The novel centers on the life of Mister Romero, who is in mourning following the death of Ignacia Vigil Romero, his Jicarilla Apache grandmother. Ignacia, also called Abuela (grandmother), is a curandera, a healer—or, to some, a witch. She raises Mister alongside Tomás, his best friend, making them more like brothers. Bound by the heart, the young men are divided by a girl, Rocky, an evocative gringa from South Carolina with a penchant for poetry. The story is set in the barrio of Taos, a community of Hispanics, American Indians, and neighboring whites. The diversity and poverty of the area urges the story on, toward a suicide pact that turns to murder.

Now on to what Sumner gets right. As a life-long river runner (canoes, drift boats, round rafts, and catarafts), I’m overly sensitive to renderings of river journeys that don’t ring true. During the summer of 1999, Mister and Tomás go to work for a Rio Grande outfitter named Cousin Bones. First off, his name is just the sort of tag you find among old river dogs, the authentic and honorable, as well as the self-absorbed and intolerable. Well done. Then, listen to this brother talk. He knows rivers and rapids, knows how a boat responds in such waters, knows what a boatman needs to do and when he needs to do it. Here, Cousin Bones gives Mister and Tomás the lowdown on an approaching rapid:

”First we’re going to hit a dicey little S-turn slot con consecuencias. You’ll get your ears wet and pop up in the Hell Hole. A six-foot boof spanks you to the middle of a seam created by recirculation from a large boulder that lies river center. Say a prayer.

Melanie Sumner

I love the detail here, the close reading of the rapid, the understanding that sometimes all a boatman can do is surrender to the river and the river gods by invocation of a prayer. Nice stuff. And who doesn’t want a little warning before getting spanked to the middle of a seam?

Another word of praise: I taught for a year on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico, and find Sumner’s rendering of Mr. Cisneros’s classroom authentic, believable, and funny. No small feat. When Rocky enters the room, the boys go all wonky:

“Yowza,” whispered Mister.

“S’up hoochie pants!” called Tomás.

“Class,” said Mr. Cisneros. “Let’s all quiet down now.” […]

“Oooh, she not from da barrio. She from Santa.”

“She punk you off, man,” said a guy named Ed. “You stanko to Santa-Girl.”

Uh huh. It was just like that for me, too. Again and again, page after page, I have no doubt that Sumner did her homework, and that she lived close to the bone in New Mexico.

The novel itself moves between two time frames: before Abuela’s death and after. It also moves between points of view: first person and third person. The first-person narrator is Abuela, telling the story from some other place, moving back and forth across the border between this world and that. Abuela is part of Mister’s thoughts and dreams, as Mister often is of hers, despite the fact that she’s dead. This is not the first novel to build a foundation on a dead narrator, but such a design never fails to unhinge, to unsettle, to agitate. In Milagro Creek, the reader enters a world of bending light and time, a world where Hamlet’s assertion is bedrock: “There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The present-time of the novel is Easter, 2001, with the suicide/murder unfolding on the evening of Holy Thursday; its past is the early to mid-1990s. It seems the story will proceed in this way, vacillating between the two, until, about half-way in, this pattern shifts to a series of police reports, interviews, and portraits of places, punctuated by the progress of Easter. I found the loss of the established pattern jarring, even a bit off-putting, but also part of how the novel is geared. (Read the work of American Indian writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, and Luci Tapahonso to find similar management of time). If Abuela is the “ghost of Milagro Creek,” (milagro is Spanish for “miracle”), then Sumner’s novel, too, is a little miracle for the way it bridges and leads and leaps, the way it frustrates and calms and punishes the reader who goes willingly over these stepping stones.

These later chapters take on a life of their own. They stand out, even work independently, as short stories, a quality which might be a strength or a weakness. For example, one chapter is narrated by Ignacia’s boyfriend, Layton Scroggins, known as Chief. He is a delightful character, with a likeable mischievousness, a thirst for experience, a belief in alternate realms. Here he reports to the Taos County Sheriff’s Department, via fax, the story of leading a sweat lodge ceremony:

The heat grew into a living thing. Across from me on the south wall, I could hear Karen’s fingers scrabbling in the quilt, trying to push back the edge to find the cool dirt underneath. I was soaked to the skin, but my nose hairs got so hot and dry, I was afraid I might blow fire. In the darkness, I felt all of us hunkering down and shrinking back to mother earth with our hearts racing toward each other. There was no relief except in prayer.

When I lived in California a few years ago, I regularly attended sweats at my Cherokee neighbor’s house. This, I can tell you, is how it was. I love this moment in the heat of the lodge when the great mystery so overwhelms that the characters bow down in prayer, allowing, at last, an authentic humility. If I can have only one gift from Sumner’s novel, I’ll take this one.

The Ghost of Milagro Creek is slow to begin but picks up after the suicide/murder. I wonder if the novel doesn’t spend too much time establishing context, balanced between the before and after, before getting to the crucial events. I wanted this, anyway. But that’s not much. I found this novel worth my time, and so feel it will be worth yours, especially if you have an interest in New Mexico, in American Indian cosmology, in narrative structure and approaches, in good storytelling.

And if you’re looking for practical advice, if you’re looking to repair something between you and your partner, you might profit by what Rocky demands of Tomás, her list of “Things You Have to Do If You Want to Hook Up with Me Again.” Love is conditional, after all. Admit it. As both Tomás and Mister are in love with Rocky, you’ll want to read the novel to find out who gets the girl, who, in the end, meets her list of conditions, which read like those holy commandments brought down from the mount:

1. Cut your toenails.

2. Quit drinking.

3. Go back to school.

4. Foreplay.

5. Quit trying to kill people just because they’re different from you.

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• The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement

Novelist Amanda Eyre Ward’s new collection of short stories, Love Stories in This Town, is at once classically aware and contemporarily hip. Readers will find the Austin Chronicle next to Hamlet and Othello, Cipro and Shiner Bock with the Boston Ballet, “I don’t love you anymore” alongside “the attacks in al-Khobar,” (though not always in the same story). Ward’s writing is crisp, fast-paced, hard-edged—descriptors that reviewers often shy away from, but I slap boldly here on the page, when, after all, on the cover Thisbe Nissen boasts that “it’s impossible to put this book down.” Seems like I’ve heard this tired claim somewhere before. Yet, I suppose what is, is.

Ward’s stories march along in staccato by the agency of strings of finely tuned, rarely fragmented sentences that line up like pearls. And yet, the effect is one of a world of fragments: broken love, broken lives, broken dreams. The book is organized in two parts, the first made up of six independent stories, the second made up of six stories centered on one character, Lola. We cover a lot of ground here: Montana, Saudi Arabia, Texas; we move through defining events: terrorism, internet startups, masturbation. Some of these are earlier stories, stories Ward wrote before she published her first novel, Sleep Toward Heaven, in 2003, and some came later. Perhaps Ward might be charged with cobbling together a book for the sake of another book out of old stories that don’t really belong together, but I’m not the man to make that charge.

As I see it, the book’s fragmentation is intentional (and even if not intentional, what of it?). Ward leads us through these fragments from beginning to end, slowly piecing a world together, bound for a unified whole. The narrative is shaped like a funnel from the first story to the last—it moves from scattered and wide to a gathering at the end of that narrowing space. Our world is fragmented, Ward seems to be saying, in all the ways that it might be, and I’m going to put it back together for you, slowly, take my hand, let’s pace ourselves.

I like this.

Amanda Eyre Ward

Part two, centered on Lola, is the stronger half of the book, which points to Ward’s prowess as a novelist, her talent for developing and sustaining story and character over the long haul. Some writers link stories out of an inability to make the transitions necessary for a novel; Ward, however, is working in the opposite direction, leaving out what she ordinarily can’t help but keep in. Lola is a compelling woman, and we experience her from both third and first person points of view (another example of this fragmentation, but the effect is, again, one of unification). She has a great deal in common with the writer who created her: both Ward and Lola were/are graduate students at the University of Montana, married a geologist, moved to Austin, TX, bore children, etc. What shall we make of this?

My favorite story, though perhaps not the best in the collection, is “She Almost Wrote Love.” Because I am a limited and selfish reader, I am first attracted to stories that resonate with my own experiences and interests. Plus, I adore stories of “how we first met.” In this one, Lola meets her geologist husband-to-be, Emmett, who works as a raft guide in the Grand Canyon. She has just completed her journalism degree and, looking for adventure, she books an outfitted trip down the Colorado. I’m reminded of Pam Houston here. One night, after a brief flirtation, Lola visits Emmett in his tent. They are refreshingly direct and honest with each other:

“I wanted to thank you for… for the trip… Also I wanted to kiss you,” said Lola.
“Come here,” said Emmett.

A few days later, dizzy in love, the new couple take off the river, shower, and marry in Las Vegas. And that is that.

The river sequences are not over-dramatized, which I appreciate, but here’s the bad news: several details in this story don’t ring true for me, and so I must complain. One: Lola wakes one morning with the taste of Beenie Weenies in her mouth. I’m from Oregon (and Idaho), and have been running rivers since I was twelve. I know for certain that Beenie Weenies is never part of the fare on an outfitted raft trip on any river, except perhaps in jest, as outfitters pride themselves on preparing astonishing meals. Two: Emmett, the guide, sleeps in a tent. I don’t know any self-respecting river guide who sleeps in a tent unless it’s winter, raining, or buggy. And three: while I’m on the subject of boats, in an earlier story, “On Messalonskee Lake,” the character Bill “had always loved the paddle to Ashworth Island.” A couple sentences later, Bill “slid[es] the boat into the water and beg[ins] to row.” Unfortunately, you don’t row and paddle the same boat. Ward marks herself as a greenhorn with this error.

In “Motherhood and Terrorism,” Emmett takes Lola off to Saudi Arabia, where he is working in the oil industry. She is miserable, in general, and lost: “ ‘I don’t feel safe here,’ said Lola, ‘and I’ve almost forgotten who I wanted to be.’” This single line, for me, defines the lives of many of the characters in this book, and the lives of many of us, Ward’s readers. Fragmentation in the modern world is a product of a world of products, in which every new shiny thing just might be the thing we’ve been looking for all our lives. But what Lola seems to know here, if even she cannot act upon it, is that each of these objects is a dead end, that she has always known who she wanted to be, perhaps who she is meant to be, and the true path is one of re-discovery. We must search for the original self between the fragments, Ward seems to be telling us, in the spaces, the gaps, the mistakes wherein this true self was lost. The structure of Love Stories in this Town—and I do think this is Ward’s greatest achievement—is not only suitable for our world, but a reflection of it. It is not just another shiny object which might be the thing we’ve been looking for, but a mirror which we must look into.

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