West of here : a novel

 by Jonathan Evison. Evison, author of this audacious historical novel, manages a near-impossible feat: first, he creates an almost absurdly complex narrative structure, bridging more than 100 years of life in Washington State and encompassing multiple points of view, and then he grounds the sublime architechtonic whole in the vividly realized daily lives of characters who exist completely in their individual moments but whose actions reverberate back and forth across time. The action swirls around the fictional town of Port Bonita, on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, and jumps between the 1890s, when various explorers and entrepreneurs were attempting to roll up their sleeves and put this place on the map, and 2006, when the descendants of those rugged individualists are in the process of dismantling the dam that their ancestors built. Yes, the tension between taming nature and restoring it drives the narrative, but it never pigeonholes it; rather, the interconnectedness of the structure expands to encompass the lives of the entrepreneur who built the dam and his ancestor who finds that failure tastes like gunmetal on his tongue; the explorer who prays for a life beyond fear, a life that got bigger, really got bigger, as it recedes ; and the factory foreman who is alternately obsessed with tracking Bigfoot and despondent over his inability to get a girl ( No woman in the history of the world had ever looked into a guy's eyes and said, You had me at Bigfoot' ). And countless others, who both support the parallels between eras and exist robustly in their own fully formed selves. Any one of Evison's numerous major characters could have owned his or her own novel; that they coexist perfectly in this one, undiminished but without overwhelming one another, is testament to the book's greatness. --Booklist (Check Catalog)