Nichols’ “Spoon Mountain” & Streit’s “Instinctive Fly Fishing” Book Signings
John Nichols (photographed by Paul O’Connor above) will sign and Rick Smith will deliver copies of On Top of Spoon Mountain, the Taos author’s latest novel on Saturday, July 28th between 4 and 7 pm at Brodsky Books, the longest-running “Read and Feed” shop in Taos (Caveat: the Nichols book party will include challenging aromatics and glib one-liners.)
Then on Thursday Aug. 2, Nichols and his fly-fishing buddy Taylor Streit will read at a Harwood- SOMOS event.
Nichols, as his friends and fans know, is the best stand-up performer in town and the new novel’s protagonist, Jonathan Kepler, novelist, screenwriter, lover, self-declared failed family man, and micro-macro observer, tells the Spoon Mountain tale in first person. The singular voice emits wise-ass remarks and pithy descriptions of medical science and the natural world at a rapid-fire machine-gun pace.
My wife, Deb and I began the novel by reading it to each other and laughing out loud. The voice reminds you of that less than enigmatic but slow-moving figure—the author himself—observed hovering around Brodsky’s bookstore or sneaking peeks at the ravens, which dive-bomb the garbage scow behind Michael’s Kitchen. In Spoon Mountain, the fictional Poppy teaches his granddaughter Lizzy to speak “raven” thanks to mail-order CDs.
The novel is a tautly written bittersweet comedy with short chapters and it’s only 213 pages (UNM Press, Albuquerque, 2012). The fictional protagonist, Kepler, is described by his spitfire daughter Miranda as “totally elliptical,” who “orbits around heavenly bodies with big boobs,” and is subject to gravity, which “pulls my dad in the wrong direction.” Just as the planet is decaying, so is Kepler’s body but he is determined to climb Spoon Mountain on his 65th birthday despite a fibrillating heart.
Will Kepler make it up the mountain and if he does will he survive? The naturalist-linguist is nothing if not obsessive about engaging the flora and fauna in this deep eco-lit adventure. Even as the wilds up there offer redemption, he gets chased by a bear down here but he doesn’t exit.
The downtown setting of the novel is enigmatically described though seemingly familiar: “This burg is all about Climax Tourism versus Abject Poverty in a multiracial gangbang located in a Shangri-La rapidly being overdeveloped and undernourished by legions of greedy former hippie in-migrants with PhDs who’ve lost their moral compasses and a bunch of indigenous folk eager to obliterate their historical mandate for moola.”
And “The smarmier side of our tony tourist is a posh ski area, many hotels, motels, and kitschy B&Bs, dozens of overpriced restaurants and schlocky art galleries surrounded by vast tracts of BLM and national forest land right out out of an Ansel Adams photograph.”
(The latter could be excerpted and quoted for a town publicity brochure if the novel were set in Taos.)
When Kepler’s extended family gathers together for the reprobate’s 65th birthday, the long-simmering dynamics break loose in chaos and the author delivers a dramatic scene that encapsulates the American nuclear family at its best. Daughter Miranda is as witty and caustic as Dorothy Parker while her brother Ben serves as the laconic and loyal straight man. It’s a coup de grace of social commentary.
Perhaps the most touching and revelatory part of the novel concerns Kepler’s ongoing self-appraisal as he wonders whether the propagandist for social and environmental justice isn’t really more akin to Groucho Marx than his famous namesake Karl? In effect, Karl Marx is famous for turning Hegel’s spiritual dialectic about history on its head and leading the way toward a materialistic view of human relations: the class struggle. As Karl Marx also said history repeats itself first as tragedy, a second time as farce.
One can interpret the author as turning the public tragedy of capitalism into Groucho’s private view of life. The novel’s Kepler claims he’s an atheist but this book has all the signs of a religious pilgrimage—sin, penance, redemption, and salvation–in the best sense—not unlike Hegel himself, whose metaphysical romance tainted the alleged materialist and utopian vision of Karl Marx.
Kepler says, “A thousand clouds evaporated justlikethat (sic) revealing an unblemished sky so benign it was inane. Warm sunlight fell upon heaven and earth. Across the way the highest third of Gavilan Peak was brightly silvered by hail and the entire basin gleamed with spectacular brilliance, trees steaming, cliffs shimmering. A pika chirped. And a dozen curious pipits alighted on nearby rocks, bobbing their narrow trails.”
Yes, contemporary American life might seem tragic but Nichols lights up the dark side with self-effacing humor and redemptive descriptions of paradise on earth. On Top of Spoon Mountain is Nichols own elegy on a career and life well loved by his fellow citizens in this outpost of America. Bravo Juanito.
(See John on July 28 at Brodsky’s “Reed and Feed” shop from 4 to 7 and on Aug 2 from 7:30 pm at the Harwood. See more at: johnnicholsbooks.com/Home.html)
P.S. As some of you know, Taylor Streit, fishing guide and writer, will appear on Aug. 2 at the Harwood with John Nichols. He is also signing a new edition of his Instinctive Fly Fishing guide from 2-4 on Saturday the 28th at Taos Fly Shop. Nichols and Streit are betting that each will out sell the other. The loser gets to carry the other one to his favorite fishing hole. See: streitflyfishing.com