The Fruit of Stone

Rating:
Summary: Fine, rich novel defines contemporary Westerners
Review: I finished Mark Spragg's book at midnight last night. As the book progressed I was so drawn into it I couldn't stop. I don't normally have the kind of mind that likes flashbacks. While reading this book I looked foward to them. I wanted to know what brought these men to this point. This is labeled as a work of fiction; however, the characters are very believable and not too diferent from Mark Spragg's first book "Where Rivers Change Direction". I would love to have a friend like Bennet and a mentor like Ansel. Buy this book you won't regret it.

Rating:
Summary: toooo bad
Review: I have read Mark spragg, his non-fiction, is a work of art. He should stick to non-fiction. This book is so bad and so unbelivable, there are no words to discribe. Save your money. Or read Where Rivers Change direction a truly magical book.

Rating:
Summary: toooo bad
Review: I have read Mark spragg, his non-fiction, is a work of art. He should stick to non-fiction. This book is so bad and so unbelivable, there are no words to discribe. Save your money. Or read Where Rivers Change direction a truly magical book.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I rated this a 4.5 and then rounded up to 5 stars. The book is a good read, but it should probably come with instructions: "Some Assembly Required." It's structured as a kind of picaresque novel, two men in a pickup (with a horse and a dog) traveling over Wyoming and some other western states in pursuit of a wife who has left home. Along the way, they are joined by a young Native American woman and a boy. This story is intercut with flashbacks to the boyhood and early youth of one of the men. And each section of the novel ends with a surreal dream sequence. How all these pieces fit together is kind of up to the reader.

There's material here that you'll find in the author's "Where Rivers Change Direction" and in his film script for "Everything That Rises" -- a rancher father and son, a man whose parents died when he was young, an old wise bachelor cowboy, the Wyoming landscape, the turn of seasons, horses, ranch work, accidents and injuries. And as in both those other works, Spragg reveals his wonderful gift for revealing character through dialogue. The book is worth reading just for how people talk to each other in a wry, ironic, self-deprecating way. And the precision in his observations of human behavior and the outdoors is in top form.

Compared to the thoughtful, interior quality of Spragg's essays, which really get you inside the mind of the writer, the novel is more cinematic. It gives vivid images of surfaces, and the inner life and motivations of the characters have to be surmised from their behavior, which is often quirky, impulsive, and upredictable. A rancher's wife loses her mind and disappears, the rancher commits suicide, a woman believes she is accompanied by a dead sister, a park ranger is attacked and left unconscious in a culvert, a man enters a convenience store and aims a rifle at the cashier. These things happen with little explanation, and the central character seems to feel that none is needed. I also found myself wanting a more inward look to understand the two middle-aged friends at the center of the story, who happen to love the same woman.

Still and all, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in modern-day western literature and first-rate writing. When Spragg is at his best, he's right on the money -- a man with too much to drink roping road signs from the back of a truck, a woman dying of cancer, the step-by-step process of replacing a corner post in a corral fence, the heat and dust behind the chutes at a rodeo, a boy caring for a friend with a broken foot in a snowstorm. As a companion, readers of this book would be interested in Gretel Ehrlich's novel "Heart Mountain". Set during the 1940s, it involves a similar love-struck bachelor cowboy living alone on a Wyoming ranch.

Rating:
Summary: A pleasure
Review: I was sent the uncorrected proof by the publisher and read the book out of curiosity. I finished it this morning, and will be re-reading it starting tonight...this time with a pencil to make notes in the gutter and margins. Spragg has written a wonderful novel. It had a hold of me from the first page and didn't want to let me go even after the last.

Rating:
Summary: A fine set piece, but...
Review: I'm a Wyo-phile, and I've lived there myself, so I have to cop to being as smitten with The West and The Idea of the West as the next person. And I like The Idea of The Fruit of Stone. But despite being a textbook (some might say "borderline cliche" instead of "textbook") example of the sincere western novel, The Fruit of Stone left me pretty cold.

The Fruit of Stone is a painstakingly crafted book. No doubt the author poured his heart into the writing. But the characters seemed dreadfully flat to me, especially the love interest. Maybe I'm over-sensitive to female characterization because I'm female, but she seemed like something of a non-event, like, WHY does he long for her so? We're neither shown nor convincingly told.

And her big confession at the end, um, not hugely credible. There'd be some blood loss issues visited upon her, methinks.

I'm not moved to bash this book, so instead, I'll say it's not the best choice for those of us who loved volatile, idiosyncratic, energetic books, like Close Range, Lonesome Dove, or The Solace of Open Spaces, where the writing of perfect sentences was forsaken in the name of a detectable pulse.

For some reason, when I read this book, I kept hearing James Taylor songs peeping through my head.

Adrenalin junkies, take heed and look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Fine, rich novel defines contemporary Westerners
Review: In his 2nd book and first novel, Fruit of Stone, Mark Spragg continues to use his considerable skills to define the men, women and the landscape of the West with a narrative that takes the reader on an unusual quest filled with unexpected twists and rich returns. .

Spragg, a writer with a keen awareness of word sentence balance is also an extraordinary storyteller. The characters in this book are vividly, boldly, and yet tenderly drawn. They captivate the reader. Each character is well developed and clearly defined with the exception of the woman who motivates the central action of the novel, the quest; she is ephemeral, sylph-like, enigmatic, and thus fascinating. She lures, beckons and frustrates both the reader and the protagonist. Gretchen carries Milton in her book bag, but it is the poet John Keats' ballad "Belle Dame sans Merci" which best describes her. She is the beautiful woman without mercy.

In the current literary landscape littered with drugstore cowboys, Mark Spragg's, McEban stands out as the genuine article as we follow him and his best friend Bennett through the mountains and plains of Wyoming and Montana, back to Wyoming and into Nebraska, an illusive Gretchen ever alluring, ever beckoning,

In the loneliness of the harsh plains and the high mountains of Wyoming the ability to trust a friend can and often does determine the survival of an individual. Spragg's cleanly drawn protagonist, rancher McEban and his best friend Bennett enjoy such a relationship.

This is a fine, rich western novel. It would be a mistake to dismiss Mark Spragg as merely a regional writer. His characters speak for the West as William Faulkner's speak for the South.

Rating:
Summary: Takes me back to Wyoming
Review: Mark Spragg has written a wonderful book. I lived part of my chilhood in Wyoming and this novel takes me back there. With joy, despair, lonelyness and longing. He gave me back the light of a very mysterious and dramatic landscape. If you are interested in the West, especially if you are from the East or Europe I would strongly suggest you have a go with this book.

Rating:
Summary: Heart's Desire
Review: Mark Spragg tells a good story populated with characters who make you want to know them -- to work with them and to drink cold beer with them after the work is done, as if they were about the most interesting friends you could ever hope to find. Spragg's characters are ranchers and stockmen and the wives and children of ranchers and stockmen, making their way through life in the high grasslands paradise of Wyoming. People, place, and the details of actual ranch life are braided into a hard-twist narrative with prose that can make you weep. Mark Spragg writes beautifully -- no other way to say it. The language seems to lope down the page, the horses and cattle to move in real sunlight hazed in the mist of their own rising dust. Page after page, it all just seems so exactly right.