Chris's Reviews > The Trackers

Since I'm a big fan of Charles Frazier it wasn't a stretch for me to like "The Trackers". I think his first novel, "Cold Mountain", could and should be taught in an English Lit course. Maybe this could too. During the Depression young painter Valentine Welch is commissioned by the WPA to paint a mural on a post office wall in Wyoming. When he arrives he discovers that the commission has a local benefactor, John Long, funding the project. Long offers Val the use of a cottage on his ranch free of charge. Val, being an artist, becomes a derisive figure among the cowboys but he has the run of the ranch and Long's seal of approval. Long is enormously wealthy and has political aspirations as well as a beautiful young trophy wife, Eve, who befriends Val. Eve has a somewhat checkered past. She was a teenage runaway who traveled with hobos in freight cars before landing a job as a singer for various bands. Her beauty and her voice are what attracted her to Long when he discovered her singing in a Western saloon. They marry shortly thereafter. But her life as the wife of a would-be politician on a lonesome ranch is not the future she had in mind. When Eve disappears one day Long, by reminding Val he is his benefactor, prevails on him to search for her.

Thus begins the tracking part of the story. Working off sketchy leads Val's detective work takes him from Wyoming, to Seattle, to Florida, and to San Francisco. In the process he is roughed up, chased, and shot at. And this is where "The Trackers" kind of lost me. I was delighted to read about the artistic processes of muralists like the fictitious Val and the actual muralists like Diego Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton. If there's a woman living on the ranch, and a potential love triangle, I can follow where that leads me. But like Eve, there was a lot I didn't sign up for. I liked "The Trackers". Beautifully written, like listening to the radio on Sunday nights when I was a kid pulling in staticky stations with different voices from far across the country. I just felt after a while the story went off the track.