Caputo Comes Across

CROSSERS, by Philip Caputo

Early in Philip Caputo's complex and elegant new novel, we first meet Ben Erskine. It is 1903, and Ben -- "a boy just past the threshold of adolescence, tall for his age, as lean as one of the ocotillo wands that fence the yard" -- becomes the book's first crosser, riding his pinto Maggie across the border from his uncle's home in Arizona's San Rafael Valley to Nogales on a routine errand with a surprisingly violent ending. "The thunderstorm rolls on, passing to the west, while the sky overhead is clear. Nothing much has changed except Ben Erskine"

We have come to expect original history-based books from Caputo: His Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War, is, as John Gregory Dunne wrote, "a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist — and the insistence is all the more powerful because it is implicit — that the reader ask himself these questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive?" And Acts of Faith, his novel set in the Sudan, also won high praise.

Crossers is in the same league, full of characters and events which start separately in various forms and in both past and present tense and which slowly begin to coalesce. After the loss of his wife on 9/11, Gil Castle leaves New York for his family's Arizona ranch, San Ignacio, overlooking the Mexican border. Gil's discovery of a Mexican illegal, left for dead after a border-crossing deal gone awry, soon merges the world of cattle and horses and operatic landscapes with the world of drug lords and coyotes and murder.

Caputo says that he at first intended to write two separate novels -- one past and one present. But then "I decided to fuse the two. At first, the historical story was going to be part one, the contemporary story was going to be part two; but that seemed too linear, too mechanical and schematic. It also violated the spirit of the book--I wanted to show that the past is never dead, that it constantly affects the present..."

Good choice. Great book.