Gabriel Tallent’s second novel, Crux, feels as if it’s trying to squeeze every possible metaphor out of every possible climbing term, and, like his hyper-loquacious protagonist Tamma, it’s a lot to take—at first. But you settle in, or maybe buckle up, as high desert kids Tamma and best buddy Dan try to send Fingerbang Princess—a sketchy, highball boulder problem—and classic routes in nearby Joshua Tree. They have no money, no rope, no crashpad; what they do have are broken families and the belief that climbing is their only way out. Queer, swear-like-a-sailor Tamma lives in a trailer and has few options, Dan has more but doesn’t seem to care. Their journey together looks like a desperate dyno move to a wafer-thin hold—low odds of success, high degree of danger—but by the end, the metaphor works.
Books were stacked against the wall. Tamma had sorted them by who would win a fight. Emily Brontë and Marcel Proust. Whitman and Melville.
Part II: Intersection, Chapter 1, page 68
The desert rocks here looked like god had tried to make drop biscuits but it hadn’t gone well, and so, embarrassed, he’d set the whole baking sheet aside in a corner. Then, 1.7 billion years later, people wandered through going, “What the fuck is all this?”
Part III: Isolation, Chapter 4, page 176
I wanted to know, for sure, that I could do it, before I made that dicey step-out into darkness. I wanted a guarantee. But that’s not how it works. You find out by trying. And for sure, whatever is out there for us, it’s gonna be scary, but scary is part of it.
Part IV: Wonderland, Chapter 4, page 289