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Tamma and Dan are 17-year-old best friends growing up in a California desert town blighted by the strip-mall nihilism of late capitalism. They’re poor. They’re unpopular. Their families are a wasteland. But they have each other and their great shared passion: trad rock climbing. Whenever they can, they head to a climbing route – sometimes a boulder at the edge of a disused parking lot, sometimes a cliff an hour’s hike into a national park – and climb, often with no gear but their bloodied bare hands and tattered shoes.
This is the premise of Crux, the second novel from Gabriel Tallent, the author of the critically acclaimed My Absolute Darling. At its heart, it’s a sports novel, and Tallent’s prose here is precise and often exquisite, inching through a few seconds of movement in a way that reflects the unforgiving nature of climbing. We get a lot of closeups of granite and faint half-moons in rock that suddenly become “the world’s numinous edge”. The language of climbing – a dialect of brainy dirtbags – is a gift to the writer. Tallent’s characters talk about “flashing bouldering problems” and “sending Fingerbang Princess”; a list of routes with “Poodle” in the title includes Poodle Smasher, Astropoodle, Poodle-Oids from the Deep, A Farewell to Poodles, and For Whom the Poodle Tolls. Tallent also has an extraordinary gift for descriptions of landscape; a road is “overhung with stooping desert lilies, tarantulas braving the tarmac in paces, running full out upon their knuckly shadows, the headlights smoking with windblown sand”.
Another pleasure of the book is Tamma, a snaggletoothed, dirty, foul-mouthed, acne-ridden, big-hearted, joyful urchin, who expresses her life’s dream as: “I want to climb hard and dangerous routes that make you shit your pants! I want to live in caves and eat dog food!” When a doctor tries to prescribe Tamma birth control, she finds increasingly baroque and allusive ways of telling him she’s gay, until she’s saying: “Will these help me if I exhume the body of Mary Wollstonecraft from her cold, worm-ridden grave and bring her back to life with a lightning strike and the two of us have undead lesbian sex while wearing full-body latex catsuits?” She’s persecuted by mean adults, who demonise her as a stupid white-trash burnout – somewhat improbably, given her quick wit, charm and negligible drug use. As all this suggests, she’s a little too good to be true: sophisticated beyond her years; hotheaded and sensitive, but never unkind or needy. She’s a manic pixie dream girl, in short, always climbing into Dan’s bedroom window “grinning from molar to molar”. Still, even at her most implausible, she has unstoppable charisma.
Dan, however, never comes into focus. The fundamental problem is that his plot stakes aren’t convincing. He’s a straight-A student, depressed for as long as he can remember, whose coming-of-age conflict is a choice between becoming a climber (the only thing with meaning for him) and going to college (which his parents, who never got an education, desperately want him to do). It’s hard for the reader to get emotionally involved in this, though, since clearly he could go to college and be a climber. It might be a compromise, but it’s an obvious one that feels like a pretty sweet deal. So it becomes incredibly frustrating that Dan never considers it, instead spending page after page agonising over his either/or decision.
Dan’s mother, Alexandra, is an equally unsatisfying character. In her teens, as an unhoused high school dropout working as a diner waitress, she wrote a 900-page bestselling literary novel in eight months. (Tallent delivers this information by having Dan look his mother up on Wikipedia.) Now ill and even more depressed than Dan, she’s given up writing and only leaves her room to deliver self-pitying monologues to her son. “I understood something, then. Lying there in that hospital bed … the truth was that people are nothing to one another and the world in which they live is finally meaningless and empty.” He listens in martyred silence while having equally dramatic thoughts: “Dan could see it, that she was a great artist, hard done by the world, and the keenness with which she felt it, and the hostility with which she now spoke, was apiece with her genius.” There are pages of this stuff, and all it really serves to do is nudge Dan back and forth in his choice between college and climbing.
Crux is a book that wanders from majesty to mediocrity, with occasional spills into outright bathos. For many readers, the great sports writing and lovable heroine will make its flaws irrelevant. But anyone who can’t get past B-movie plotting should sit this one out.
