In the Moon of Red Ponies (a review)

James Lee Burke is a master of scenic description with a novelist's grasp of the good and bad impulses that motivate people. Having read some of his early fiction about New Orleans detective Dave Robicheaux, I expected In the Moon of Red Ponies to be a satisfying excursion through the world of what might be called "Western Noir," as though this book were the progeny of a mating between Farewell, My Lovely and Lonesome Dove.

I was half-right. The book is "Western Noir," but perhaps its most obvious literary antecedent is John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Yes, that comparison puts Burke in fast company. On the whole, however, I can't recommend In the Moon of Red Ponies, and would have to call it an ambitious failure.

The most significant problem with the book is its protagonist, Billy Bob Holland. Burke makes Holland a Texas Ranger turned Montana lawyer. He's as stubborn as you'd expect. He's also unrelentingly morose, which means he suffers in comparison to the other characters in the book. Psychotic rodeo clown Wyatt Dixon, for example, is painted as an extreme villain who had nearly killed Billy Bob's wife in a previous book. But Dixon -- in spite of the chemical cocktail he drinks on court orders to maintain a semblance of moral and social equilibrium -- proves better and wiser company than Holland.

When two men break into Dixon's rural home while he's having breakfast, he surprises them with a cheerful "howdy doodle, boys" before savaging them with the iron skillet in his hand. Holland, by contrast, broods his way through all 336 pages. In mayhem or in calm, he's more stoic and less accessible than his nemesis or "Johnny American Horse," the American Indian activist whose dreams give the book its title.

Midway through the story, Burke's sermons about the evils of corporations and the perfidy of the federal government begin to wear thin. We get them coming and going: from Billy Bob, from Johnny, and from a lonely cop.

The political angle colors an industrial burglary for which American Indian activists are prime suspects, but it struck me as more heavy-handed than it should have been. To push the book even further from literature and into "beach read" territory, agony aunt Billy Bob Holland crosses paths with a Foghorn Leghorn-type of United States Senator and his hot young blue-eyed daughter (the rebel dating "beneath her station").

Rule of thumb: When a cheerfully deranged psychopath and an activist who never says much make a better impression than the protagonist of your novel, a rewrite may be in order.