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Summary
Summary
To a town called Salamander comes Carlisle McMillan, a traveler and master carpenter seeking a place of quiet amid the grinding roar of progress. Near Wolf Butte, a strange and apparently haunted monolith, he finds his quiet, or so he believes, and begins rebuilding a decrepit house as a tribute to the gruff old man who taught him a carpenter's skills, rebuilding his life at the same time. But his quiet is shattered as bulldozer treads begin to turn and the Yerkes County War commences.
Author Notes
Robert James Waller was born in Charles City, Iowa on August 1, 1939. He received a bachelor's degree in business education in 1962 and a master's degree in education in 1964 from the State College of Iowa and a doctorate of business administration in finance in 1968 from Indiana University's school of business. He taught management and economics starting in 1967 at the University of Northern Iowa and was appointed dean of its business school in 1980.
While teaching, he began writing travel and nature essays for The Des Moines Register's Sunday edition. These were collected in Just Beyond the Firelight: Stories and Essays and One Good Road Is Enough. He took an unpaid leave of absence from teaching in 1990 and obtained a $200,000 grant from the state to study the future of the region. His report, Iowa: Perspectives on Today and Tomorrow, was published in 1991.
His first novel, The Bridges of Madison County, was published in 1992. It was adapted into a film in 1995 starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood and as a Broadway musical in 2014. His other novels included Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend, Puerto Vallarta Squeeze: The Run for el Norte, Border Music, A Thousand Country Roads: An Epilogue to The Bridges of Madison County, High Plains Tango, and The Long Night of Winchell Dear. He also recorded an album entitled The Ballads of Madison County. He died from multiple myeloma on March 10, 2017 at the age of 77.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A mysterious loner tries to find love and peace of mind in rural South Dakota in Waller's latest, a tepid, unfocused novel that begins when a handsome, independent drifter, Carlisle McMillan, arrives in the tiny town of Salamander. McMillan is the son of Bridges of Madison County photographer Robert Kincaid; he previously appeared in A Thousand Country Roads, in search of his father. The California native and master carpenter with a Stanford degree finds his interest piqued by Salamander, and he buys an abandoned house just outside town, making plans to rebuild it. But trouble comes calling when a corrupt developer decides to seize McMillan's house as part of a potentially lucrative highway project; McMillan fights back with a well-organized battle plan that gets him in trouble with most of the town's residents. Romance is in the offing, too, of course: McMillan takes up with comely Gally Deveraux shortly after her brutish husband dies, but the real object of his desire is beautiful Susanna Benteen, a wild, mysterious woman who keeps company with the local Sioux as they observe McMillan in his fight against the highway project. Waller offers a bit more substance here than in other post-Bridges offerings, but he's still hamstrung by clich?. The result is yet another half-baked attempt to recapture the magic of Madison County. Agent, David Vigliano. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Waller's latest book is centered on the son of Robert Kincaid, the hero of Waller's best-selling The Bridges of Madison County0 (1992). His name is Carlisle McMillan, and readers first leaned about him in the sequel to that book, A Thousand Country Roads 0 (2002). Carlisle, an enigmatic drifter, has wandered from California to South Carolina and is headed back west when he happens on the small South Dakota town of Salamander. In the local diner, he meets one woman, the unhappily married Gally Deveraux, and then becomes entranced by another, ethereal outsider Susanna Benteen, whom he catches sight of one night. Carlisle decides to make his home in Salamander so that he can avoid "the great economic colossus called progress." Poor Carlisle's timing couldn't be worse; in the hopes of invigorating the area, a plan is afoot to build a highway that will run right by Salamander and right through the old house that Carlisle has spent months renovating. Feelings about the highway divide the town, but Carlisle is determined to fight it with everything he has. Expect huge demand for this title from readers eager to continue reading about the Kincaid family. --Kristine Huntley Copyright 2005 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Waller (Puerto Vallarta Squeeze, 1995, etc.) brings schmaltz to another plane with this tale of a small prairie town threatened by evil highway developers. One of the few surprises here is that the setting--the tiny burg of Salamander, S.D.--is far from idealized. Instead of the expected portrait of hardy Midwestern folk fighting tough times and bad weather with heartland pluck, we get a caustic handful of farmers griping about big government while pocketing their subsidy checks and watching their town dry up and start to blow away. Into this landscape of no expectations comes Carlisle McMillan, a bookish California carpenter with a vaguely hippy air and looks that set the womenfolk's hearts aflutter. With his hardscrabble, educated idealism and rough-hewn good looks, he's like Jesus with a libido. Carlisle buys a rundown shack on the outskirts of town and sets about renovating it, which provides the bulk of the drama for about the first half of the story. Sadly, that's much more interesting than the melodramatic complications that follow. Once Carlisle finishes his shack--filled with gorgeous little handcrafted objets d'art, as well as not one but eventually two nubile local women, wouldn't you know--he has the luck to find a rare species of hawk living nearby. The hawks become an issue once the government decides to run a six-lane highway right through his land. The townspeople, worried that Carlisle and his endangered birds are going to stall the highway (which they've been hoodwinked into thinking is an economic necessity), launch a campaign of intimidation, which proves far less interesting than the mundane details of how he fixed it up his house. Swinging from renovation chic to antidevelopment polemic, Waller stops along the way for some hackneyed business about an Indian sacred site nearby. About half a book, and pretty thin at that. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A young drifter named Carlisle settles down to build his own house in South Dakota near Wolf Butte (sacred to the Sioux), longs to tango with beautiful outsider Susanna, and gets real mad when the government wants to build a highway right through his newfound home. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Not exactly a dark and stormy night, but nonetheless: a strange, far place in a strange, far time, distant buttes with low, wet clouds hanging across their rumpled white faces and long, straight highways running somewhere close to forever. In a settled land, the truly wild places are where nobody is looking anymore. This was a wild place. Enigmatic sign pointing west. Why did the eagle die? Did anyone remember? Some did, but they weren't talking. Red dirt road perpendicular to the highway, heading into the short grass and disappearing over a low rise a half mile out. Other signs, every thirty miles or so, pointing to other roads hinting travel through invisible walls and into other times. If you had a vehicle with enough stamina, maybe turn off on one of them, just for the hell of it. We've all had a fleeting urge to do that. That's what Carlisle McMillan did. He was in no hurry, a traveler without design, a temporary drifter by his own choice. After turning his tan Chevy pickup off westbound pavement onto what the locals called Wolf Butte Road, he headed south past the Dead Eagle Canyon sign. After a while, he stopped his truck and got out, miles from the nearest little town. Late August cool. Mist. Carlisle McMillan stood there for a few moments, boots becoming grass wet, sky water on his face and hands. Easy wind came, went, came again. Silence. Cattails bending, yellow clover riffling as the wind chose. Like a film without a sound track--the silence--only deeper. More like a stone coffin at nightfall when the mourners have left and dirt has been shoveled over you. The Cheyenne believed this was sacred ground. Sweet Medicine said it was so. The hawk sitting thirty fence posts south of Carlisle McMillan believed it. Anyone who happened on this place believed it. The smart money would come with food and water, perhaps a sleeping bag, in case an engine failed or a tire relented and the spare was empty. For nothing out here cared about you, that much was clear. Nothing cared whether you lived or died or paid your bills or danced on warm Pacific beaches and made love afterward. There was nothing except silence and wind, and they would be here long after your passing. The Early Ones were buried here in mounds, giving the appearance of sea roll to the prairie. They shuffled across the old land bridges from Asia when the continents were connected in the high north. A century ago, others were buried in this place. Buried where they fell in the wars of Manifest Destiny, the great westward push. You could still find metal buttons from cavalry tunics if you scuffled around in the gravel and looked close. Other things, too, old knife handles, human shoulder bones splintered by lance and bullet, pipe stems. If you dug, you would find more, a lot more. Six inches behind Carlisle McMillan's left rear tire was a tunic button half buried in the mud. The winds of a hundred springs uncovered the button, rain washed it into a creek. The creek carried it onto a sandbar. A bird picked it up and flew toward a nest, dropping it when it turned out to be hard and tasteless. That particular button once fastened the coat of Trooper Jimmy C. Knowles, Seventh Cavalry, who rode behind a man they called Son of the Morning Star. Trooper Knowles thought well of his yellow-haired general and aspired to be a cut-and-paste copy of him. He would have ridden into hell with Son of the Morning Star. And he eventually did. If you can get past the wind, listen beyond the silence, there are old sounds reverberating here. Distant bugles, squeak of cavalry leather, maybe the low thrum of time itself. And faint images of old riders from a long time ago, mounted on fine Appaloosas, breaking from the shadows of Dead Eagle Canyon, running hard across the roll of green prairie, and turning their ponies for autumn, steam coming from muzzles and mouths. Sometimes you can even smell things farther out when the wind is just right. That's what they said and still say. You have to lean back and flare your nostrils. Work at it. Then it will come to you. First the ordinary smells of big, open country and after that the faint whiff of old deceptions. Not far from where Carlisle McMillan stood in light rain and looked out across the rise of nothing, the anthropologist fell to his death from one of the smaller buttes. There had been the sound of rushing air followed by the thump of something high in the middle of his back, causing him to stagger forward from where he was standing and launching him into downward flight. The first eighty feet or so, his fall had a certain purity in its form and velocity, almost graceful. Until he hit an outcropping. After that, it was a Raggedy-Ann tumble for the next six hundred feet. The only sound was his scream, and his only perception was that of the cliff face going by him in a blur of white sandstone. He smashed into rock and gravel at the bottom, neck twisted rearward in such a way that his chin could touch the bottom of his right shoulder blade. None of his colleagues on the plain below had seen it happen or heard his cry. A pair of dark eyes had seen it, though--the man falling through cool sunlight, the thin and yellow sunlight that sweeps this land in middle spring--but nothing would be said. Nothing, not ever. It was the way of things. That was known long before the horse soldiers rode through here on their way to the Little Big Horn. That was known a long time ago. Carlisle McMillan leaned on a fence post, looked west, stared at the distance. Great run of empty space, broken only by an occasional butte. The one a half mile to his right, 3,237 feet high, was called Wolf Butte. A woman was dancing there on the crest, but Carlisle couldn't see her. Bare feet on short grass, she moved. Far off, far down, she could just make out a figure standing beside a pickup truck. Twenty feet behind her, the Indian played a flute, his back resting against the gnarled trunk of a long-dead scrub pine. A low-slung cloud moved onto the butte, the cold wetness of it touching the graceful arch of the woman's back, touching the curve of her legs. It touched her face and the opal ring on her left middle finger and the silver bracelet around her right wrist, touched the silver falcon hanging from the chain around her neck. The Indian could not see her clearly anymore, only transient sightings through the cloud, a momentary view of leg or breast or the swing of long auburn hair as she turned. But still he played, knowing the cloud would pass, knowing she would come to him. Far off and far down, Carlisle McMillan shifted his truck into reverse and backed onto the road, grinding into the mud a tunic button that once fastened the blue coat of Trooper Jimmy C. Knowles, Seventh Cavalry. When the cloud drifted away from the butte and the woman again could see what lay on the plain below her, the figure was gone, only the vague image of a pickup truck moving south. The flute angled down to silence. She raised her arms through the mist to the sky, lowered them, and walked toward the Indian. He was old, but his body was hard like fence wire, and she settled onto him. The wind was light and cool and wet. Close to her, he could smell the sandalwood with which she had bathed that morning. The rain lifted for a moment, and over the Indian's shoulder she watched the hawk flying toward a cliff, the same one from which her father had glimpsed the earth rising toward him. Excerpted from High Plains Tango by Robert James Waller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.