The Thin Mountain Air by Paul Horgan (1977) (L33c4) Farrar Straus and Giroux HC

The epigraph is La Rouchefoucauld's ""There is only one kind of love--but there are a thousand different imitations of it,"" and Horgan's ever-adolescing Richard (Everything to Live For, 1968) continues to tiptoe his elegant way around sensual, violent (as well as sentimental) contacts, apparently confident that the early-1920s setting will explain away the dislocation between tone and events. The splendid opening chapters are free of this problem, with Richard worshipfully observing his father's successful campaign for the lieutenant-governorship of New York and then--when the Lieutenant-Governor's life is endangered by tuberculosis--leaving college to assist his parents in their remove to recuperative, oddly social Albuquerque. But once out of the bosom of his family, working (doctor's orders) on aging Don Elizario Wenzel's WZL Ranch, Richard's amorphous presence--and Horgan's decorous prose--finds itself involved with sheep-dipping, Don Elizario's eighteen-year-old virgin wife, an exhibitionistic stud ranchhand, and an anything-goes doxy-waitress. Richard wonders ""What was I enduring among the people around me?"" and--after the stud talks him into an orgy a trois with the waitress--""Where would last night ever fit into the comforts and graces of our life at home?"" Where indeed?--nor does the subsequent rape/murder of the Wenzels by the ranchhand seem real when reported by our unflappably dewy memoirist. Finally back on comfier ground, Richard watches his father die (after a brief, hectic political comeback) and is left to ponder Dad's deathbed confession of an extramarital liaison: ""In every life, Richard, there is something, great or small, to be ashamed of."" Horgan is a gifted, restrained writer when coddling the right materials, but Richard is a gutless wonder who should stick to home comforts or find a mode of communication more in accord with his alleged coming-of-age and lust for life.

ISBN: 0374274665
Format: hardcover
Pages: 312
Book Condition: Good
Defects: may be ex library / has the plastic / looks like somebody learning cursive signed on the title page
Dust Jacket: good
Copyright: 1977 by Paul Horgan
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Edition: First Printing 1977

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