Cutting Stone CL

Burroway's ( The Buzzards ) startling new novel takes up the taming of the American frontier--a classic theme to which she brings a wholly fresh outlook. While most writers and legend-mongers depict the West as the terrain of limitless promise, she charts a land of bankrupt dreams. Her characters do not stake their claims; instead, they find themselves endlessly alienated, mocked by the very notion of home. In 1914, Eleanor Poindexter, a young society woman from Baltimore, accompanies her tubercular husband to Bowie, Ariz., where the dry heat restores his health but singes Eleanor's willingness to honor conventions. Her affair with a married rancher produces tragic consequences worthy of a Greek drama, a development Burroway offsets with an acutely funny story line involving a Bowie native who is proud to have been swept up by Pancho Villa's revolutionary forces in Mexico. Fugitives and exiles, townsfolk and Mexican soldiers convene in Bowie for a finale loosely rooted in history. Burroway's uncanny balance of various tones and her hard-edged view of American aspirations gain even more strength from her unflinching observations--dust storms, schoolyard cruelties and the drowning of kittens receive the same precise descriptions as do landscapes and passions. Fierce and unyielding, this is the prose of a pioneer. (Apr.)