Gabriel Tallent's follow-up to 'My Absolute Darling' centres on 17-year-old best friends Tamma and Dan, who grow up in a California desert town blighted by the strip-mall nihilism of late capitalism. Poor and unpopular, they find solace in their shared passion for trad rock climbing, often scaling routes with nothing but bare hands and tattered shoes.
Tallent's prose is precise and often exquisite, capturing the unforgiving nature of climbing through close-ups of granite and descriptions of landscape. A road, for instance, is 'overhung with stooping desert lilies, tarantulas braving the tarmac'. The language of climbing – a dialect of brainy dirtbags – enriches the narrative, with characters discussing 'flashing bouldering problems' and routes like 'Poodle Smasher' and 'Astropoodle'.
Tamma, the novel's heroine, is a snaggletoothed, dirty, foul-mouthed, acne-ridden, big-hearted urchin who dreams of climbing hard routes and living in caves. Her charisma is unstoppable, though she verges on a manic pixie dream girl. When a doctor tries to prescribe her birth control, she responds with increasingly baroque allusions, including a plan to exhume Mary Wollstonecraft's body for undead lesbian sex.
Dan, however, never comes into focus. His central conflict – choosing between a climbing life and college – is unconvincing, as he could easily pursue both. His mother Alexandra, a former teen author of a 900-page bestseller, now ill and depressed, delivers self-pitying monologues that fail to engage. The plotting overall lacks conviction, despite the novel's pleasures in sports writing and character.
