THE TRACKERS

Frazier goes in search of the American dream amid the seemingly endless nightmare of the Great Depression.

The ambitions here are as lofty as one of those murals commissioned by the Works Progress Administration to lift the nation’s spirits and provide some income for indigent artists. One such (fictional) artwork has the same title as this novel, as young painter Valentine “Val” Welch travels west to the small town of Dawes, Wyoming, to create a mural in their post office that will capture the spirit of the country. His former art professor got him the job and has also connected him with the wealthy art patron John Long, who has extensive property there and a glamorous young wife named Eve. As first-person narrator, Val struggles to figure out what the deal is between the married couple. Then there’s the mysterious Faro, a cowboy relic of the Western past whose association with Long predates his marriage and whose relationship with Eve has a furtive element to it. (He may well provide the moral compass here.) Long has political aspirations, and Eve adds some dazzle. She also has a past that includes bumming around the country and singing in a country dancehall band, where her husband (and so many others) first became attracted to her. She also may or may not have had a previous husband, who may or may not be dead. Once she takes off, Long sends Val to find her. It’s a big country, and he’s no detective, but he doesn’t have as much difficulty as you’d think. In the process, he complicates the plot in a couple of different ways, and he, as the tracker, soon has other trackers in his pursuit. For a novel that traverses the country from Seattle to back-swamp Florida, the writing is curiously static, filled with meticulous descriptions and philosophical soliloquies, with all sorts of stilted conjecture about fate, art, and America (and no quotation marks).

By the end, not even the characters seem to care much about who finds whom.