Rating: 
Summary: Ellen Meloy's book is recommended for its imagery and humor.
Review: What an interesting and very different book The Last Cheater's Waltz was. Ellen Meloy has an artist's vision through an environmentalist's kaleidoscope. Yes, some of her transitions are disconnected as are some of her metaphysical railings against the atom bomb and desert testing in the southwest. However, she also has a deliciously unique sense of humor, which broadens the books appeal. She sufficiently subordinates her environmentalist tree-hugging or in her case, cactus-hugging compassion thereby avoiding preachiness. She also teases and twits, writing "In town a flying wedge of mountain bikers, dressed in painted-on spandex body gloves mail-ordered from Bulgarian sex manuals, overshot their mecca to the north, and ended up here, spreading the gospel of polymers and finding no converts in a land clearly devoid of granola and decent trails." Quoting one of her other humorous passages about her Utah desert home, where she lives with her husband, she writes: "I inhabit a place where there is not much chance of being eaten by large mammals. So far the possibility of a golf course is slim. The popular media are action videos and pulp info-dramas dished out by satellite. Say "Kierkegaard" around here, and some of us might think you are choking on a walnut. In town a mix of cultures, an artistic bent, and an unexpected worldliness breed a loose-jointed tolerance. In the surrounding country, values fall into the category of ultraconservative rural western,underlain with Utah's insular Mormon theocracy. In the county seat the building that houses local government shares its town block with the building that hosts the predominant faith: the distance between church and state is precisely 34.5 feet. I inhabit a place where I must drive to another state for a screw, and where, when I get to that state, go to a liquor store, stand before a decent selection of wine, and start to sob,the proprietor says in a voice sodden with pity, "You're from Utah, aren't you?" Meloy loves going into the desert on frequent voyages of discovery, both whetting and easing her own inner torments about life, death, and its interplay in nature. She uses wonderful word images. She lives in a place where running away from home means looking for "the nearness of the unimagined." The Last Cheater's Waltz rewards the reader with a glimpse of that home.
| 
