Crux Review by Gabrielle Tallent – ​​An Emotional Portrait of Teenage Climbers | imaginary

TAmma and Dan are 17-year-old best friends who grew up in a California desert town plagued by the mall nihilism of late capitalism. They are poor. They are unpopular. Their families are a barren land. But they have each other and their great common passion: traditional rock climbing. Whenever they can, they head to a climbing route — sometimes a boulder at the edge of an abandoned parking lot, sometimes a cliff an hour’s walk into a national park — and climb, often with no equipment other than their bare, bloody hands and tattered boots.

This is the premise of Crux, the second novel from Gabriel Tallent, author of the critically acclaimed My Abstract Darling. It is, at heart, a sports novel, and Tallent’s prose here is precise and often brilliant, moving slowly through a few seconds of action in a way that reflects the unforgiving nature of the climb. We get lots of close-ups of granite and faint half-moons in the rocks that suddenly become the “sacred edge of the world.” The language of the climber – the dialect of the filthiest of minds – is a gift to the writer. Talent’s characters talk about “flickering rock problems” and “sending up the finger princess.” The list of roads with “Poodle” in the title includes Poodle Smasher, Astropoodle, Poodle-Oids from the Deep, A Farewell to Poodles, and For Whom the Poodle Tolls. Tallent also has an unusual talent for describing landscapes. The way is “Topped with bending desert lilies, spiders defy the runway in their stride, running full tilt on their articulated shades, headlights smoking with wind-blown sand.”

Another joy in the book is Tama, a toothy, filthy, foul-mouthed, acne-ridden, big-hearted, playful urchin girl, who expresses her life’s dream as follows: “I want to climb difficult, dangerous routes that make you shit on your pants! I want to live in caves and eat dog food!” When the doctor tries to prescribe Tama birth control, she finds increasingly subtle and suggestive ways to tell him she’s gay., Until you say, “Would it help me if I exhumed Mary Wollstonecraft from her cold, worm-infested grave and brought her back to life with a lightning strike and we both had gay sex while wearing full-body rubber suits?” She’s persecuted by mean adults, who smear her as a jaded, white-trash idiot—somewhat improbable, given her quick wit, charm, and minimal drug use. As all of this suggests, she’s too good to be true: sophisticated beyond her years; Impulsive and sensitive, but never cruel or needy. She’s a manic dream girl, in short, always climbing into Dan’s bedroom window “smiling molar to molar.” However, even in its most implausible states, it has an unstoppable appeal.

But Dan was never the focus. The main problem is that his stakes in the plot are not convincing. A diligent student, as depressed as he can remember, his struggle as an adult is choosing between becoming a climber (the only thing that has meaning to him) and going to college (which his parents, who never had any education, desperately want him to do). It’s hard for the reader to get emotionally involved in this, because he obviously could go to college and Be a climber. It may be a compromise, but it’s an obvious solution that sounds like a pretty sweet deal. So it becomes extremely frustrating that Dan never thinks about it, and instead spends page after page agonizing over his either/or decision.

Dan’s mother, Alexandra, is an equally unsatisfying character. In her teens, when she dropped out of high school without housing and worked as a waitress in a restaurant, she wrote a 900-page best-selling literary novel in eight months. (Talent provides this information by having Dan look up his mother on Wikipedia.) Now sick and more depressed than Dan, she has given up writing and only leaves her room to deliver self-pitying monologues to her son. “I get something then. Lying there in the hospital bed…the truth is that people are nothing to each other, and that the world they live in is finally meaningless and empty.” He listens in martyr’s silence as equally dramatic thoughts occur to him: “Dan could see that she was a great artist, hard-pressed by the world, and the enthusiasm with which she felt, and the hostility with which she now spoke, were consistent with her genius.” There are pages of this stuff, and all it really does is push Dan back and forth in his choice between college and climbing.

Crux is a book that moves from majesty to mediocrity, with occasional spills in the overt bathrooms. For many readers, great sports writing and a likable heroine will make her flaws irrelevant. But anyone who can’t get past planning a B-movie should ignore this one.