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Murder, He Wrote
| Article
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13102 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
1,451 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
DESERT LIGHT
Chilton Williamson Jr.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987
230 pp., $15.95
Chilton Williamson, Jr., obviously has no desire to bring his fat columns on political and economic reading from the National Review, for which he works as a senior editor, into his other life as the author of fiction. His new book, Desert Light, does, however, reflect the influence of Williamson's New England Calvinist roots. Williamson is descended from vintage New Englanders, and his father, a historian, has written widely on early New England life. Like his Puritan ancestors, Williamson (who now lives in western Wyoming) has made his own pilgrimage into the wilderness, which he reveres for hardening character, and not for refining tastes or developing aesthetic pleasure.
In this murder mystery set in the high plains of western Wyoming, Williamson recounts the physical and spiritual odyssey of a former New York lawyer, Chuck Richardson. Fleeing his life as a socialite, he settles in a sparsely populated cow town, Fontenelle, Wyoming, where he undergoes an identity crisis and spends several years living on the edge of society. Bookish Wyoming lawyer Hal Pearce and his assistant, Mary Elena, bring Richardson back into the fold of human community. The murder trial of Jenny Peterson, a hapless girl whom Richardson helps Pearce defend, continued the process of social reintegration. Though Richardson is initially skeptical about Jenny's innocence, he gradually sympathizes with her as he unravels the skein of circumstantial evidence that only appears to prove her guilt. In the end his sympathy turns to affection, and Richardson ceases to be a loner.
The author pulls off the book in spite of the sometimes unlikely turns in the story. For example, one is never entirely convinced of the plausibility of Richardson leaving a promising legal career or his glamorous wife in the East to become a quasi-derelict in a small Wyoming town. Jenny, the chief female character, who has been framed in a murder after being abducted, also passes through unlikely turns of fortune. Finally, the book closes without a full and satisfactory denouement: that is, without clearing up the legal problems caused by Jenny's and Richardson's unauthorized flight from the still-undecided trial. Having them escape from the scene of the action, and then to a mountain retreat, can be viewed only as an escape from the exigencies of resolving the complications produced by the
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