The Lake

A disenchanted philosophy student seeks his roots and finds an unstable Louisiana family in poet Villasenor's debut novel, whose lush prose and evocative landscapes owe more than a little to Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. Found lying down in a highway near Charlottesville, Va., Zach Brannagan wakes up in a mental hospital. Unorthodox psychiatrist Michael Lazar diagnoses Zach's problem as lack of reality, and prescribes a trip home. Spiritual home for Zach, however, is not with his uncaring parents, a businessman father and New Age mother. And no wonder: Lazar pries through legal documents, and reveals to Zach that he was adopted at age four. Vowing to find his half-Navajo birth mother, Zach boards a bus for Arizona. After he is robbed in New Orleans and is forced to stay in a horrendous homeless shelter, he makes his way to Marjolaine, La. There he encounters the free-spirited Anna Beauchamp, who runs a home for unwanted and hurt children on her 40-acre homestead, called The Lake. One of Anna's young charges, red-haired, mute Sam, takes a special liking to Zach. By the novel's midpoint, Zach has cast off his metaphysical shackles, finding a home and a romance of sorts with Anna. But he feels he must complete his quest, and he and Sam leave Marjolaine on Anna's bicycle. This time the journey ends in disaster. Villasenor's baroque sentences, mimicking the tangle of Southern backwoods flora, ring fluent changes on Biblical figures of speech and follow the spirals of Zach's abstract meditations. Some readers will find that the strength of the prose more than compensates for the rather cumbersome plot. Others may have trouble staying with Zach on his heavily symbolic quest. Rights sold in Germany, the U.K., Italy, France and the Netherlands. (July)