Scotty’s family owns a lodge near their silver mine in the Colorado Rockies. Summers at the lodge are idyllic for Scotty and his cousin Mickey. The grown-ups are dealing with the complications of business and adult dysfunction, but the boys are more interested in the complications of puberty, especially when Rosalind, the teenage daughter of family friends, is on hand. To read this quiet, rich evocation of adolescent watchfulness is to experience what it is like to be fourteen years old, waiting for something to happen, aware of everything but oblivious to as much of it as possible. Readers will be reminded of such modern masters as William Maxwell and John Updike.
The Canyon bridges youth and maturity, achieving a perspective that transcends both.
The Canyon features a narrator with exceptionally observant powers struggling to find his place in the world.…[A] lyrical and quietly compelling story.
A wonderful portrait of the natural world and of the beginning of childhood’s end, written with simplicity, rich humor, poetic depth, and restraint. The writing is very evocative of the time period, with deeply accurate descriptions of everyday things that bespeak the late 1940s. You really believe you are there. Throughout, there is a tranquility to the prose that is hard to match. What is unsaid underneath this tranquility is very powerful. There is also a quiet but lovely humor throughout the book. You just don’t get books as well crafted and original as this very often.
Stanley Crawford is also the author of Petroleum Man and four other novels, as well as three books of nonfiction published by the University of New Mexico Press: Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm, and The River in Winter: New and Selected Essays. He lives in northern New Mexico.
