Teres's Reviews > The Trackers

Young painter Valentine “Val” Welch travels to the small town of Dawes, Wyoming to paint a mural in its post office as part of the Works Progress Administration, one of FDR’s New Deal projects to employ artists in the wake of the Great Depression. 

Charles Frazier's novel gets its title from Val's mural, which depicts "a trio of trackers," two Native and one white, who "embody the hinge of time in this place, that moment not far past first contact between the Plains Indians and whites, the point where everything changed except landscape and weather."

Wealthy art patron and rancher John Long, who has extensive property and a glamorous young wife named Eve, offers to house and feed Val while he works on his mural.

Long aspires to the U.S. Senate, and Eve, before she married him, rode the rails as a transient, lived in shantytowns, and sang in a cowboy swing band... she also may or may not have had a previous husband, who may or may not be dead.

When Eve takes off without notice, Long sends Val to find her. He, as the tracker, soon has others in his pursuit.

The artist-turned-amateur-private-eye takes us across Depression-era America as he searches for Eve.

Boy, ol’ Will Shakespeare sure got it right when he said, “the past is prologue.” The parallels from the 1930s with today’s political, economic, and social issues — from concerns over housing to the Supreme Court — is rather astounding. It seems history does, in fact, repeat itself.

While Frazier succeeds in capturing the historical details of this distinctive American era, where he falls short is the narrative of the story.

Told in first person by Val, Trackers has a very noir feel to it — complete with femme fatale Eve. I could almost hear Joe Friday as I followed along.

But, and this is a BIG but, this dialog-heavy story contains no quotation marks. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

I know there are many reasons that authors choose not to use quotation marks. I, however, am not a fan.

It slows down the narrative. I have to work harder to understand what’s going on when thoughts and dialogue intermingle. The dialogue becomes passive instead of active as if you’re reading everything in the past tense.

Not a fan of this choice. Minus a star, Mr. Frazier, for an otherwise wonderful book.