The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spanbauer (1991)

The part of this book to which I respond most is its intensity, made real by Spanbauer's concentration on the point of view of the main character, Duivichi-un-Dua, a seemingly Native American young man living in the early years of the twentieth century in a small town in Idaho. His thoughts govern this book. His attitude of mind is poetic, slow-discovering, challenging and wonderingly perceptive. More broadly, the book is a hybrid, swinging between the low cloudy-grey realities of this voice, and a style which could most accurately be called best-little-whorehouse-in-Idaho-esque. Our young man is living in violent times. He is 'attached' via his mother, possibly a Bannock woman, to the establishment of Ida Richilieu, a bar- and brothel-owner of Excellent, Idaho. Jewish Ida is a typical renegade, spirited, challenging all comers. She has left the east to find a freer life which suits her more out west, as have most of her customers, which is indeed most of the town. Violence permeates their lives. Our hero is raped when young by a local crazy, and after recovering begins to 'work' for Ida out in a shed behind her place, servicing gentleman callers. This illustrates the lilt of this book; it tips and swings between horror-experiences and so-called 'life affirming' stuff, where the whores all have great hearts and those without are the religious loons. The seething reality of murder, medical operations without anaesthetic, deprivation and other such western straightforwardness is balanced by the fantasy of free sexuality and roistering, which is delivered in a way which runs desperately close sometimes to 50s to 80s Hollywood tropes. Certainly it is not historically viable. Which is perfectly OK as long as it's understood to be a fantasy: many of the male characters are thrilled and intrigued by male-male sexuality and explore it with one another almost proudly, and there's not a sign of shame, secrecy, and all the twistedness that goes with that, which would have been a hallmark of those times - the squashedness is missing, presumably deliberately. All sorts of philosophising is done by the main characters, which also has a strong whiff of much more modern times. But no matter how trumped up these elements feel, there is real power in the voice and perceptions of Duivichi much of the time, almost a sense of comfort in his sensitivity, openness and grounded poetry. He's discovered to not be Native American near the end, and lots of the perceptions that troubled the characters not true; they've all been through hell, are decimated, dead, de-limbed, drug-addled and depressed, and the Mormons have taken over the town. But, between some of the lines, and up front in the rest of them, there is a real spirit-story here which claims the heart.