Those who miss watching the TV movie-of-the-week may find comfort in Novak's second novel (after Five Mile House), a melodramatic but earnest story about a desperate mother in search of her missing son. Joyce, a Vermont wife, is distraught when her 17-year-old son and his girlfriend run away. One evening, she empties her savings accounts, abandons her husband and heads west, toting photos of her son and his girlfriend. On a tip from a hitchhiker, she aims for Lágrimas, a dead-end California town on the edge of the Mojave Desert. There she meets young Danny, a lost soul who has been taken in by the locals. Danny, quite implausibly, communicates only in sections of dialogue from Shakespeare's The Tempest; out of a desire to mother him, or simply because she lacks any other options, Joyce buys the town's only bar, the Hoodoo, and waits for her son to turn up. She finds solace in the people of Lágrimas, perhaps because they are as desperate and worn-out as she is, though many remain suspicious of her. There's Duncan, Danny's primary caretaker and roughneck owner of a scrap yard; TJ, the Hoodoo's cheery waitress; and a group of hard-drinking regulars who are a quirky, more depressed version of the gang from Cheers. It's no secret that all the elements—from the oddball Lágrimas residents to the angelic Danny—are all carefully positioned to push Joyce down the path to redemption. A burgeoning romance with Duncan and a subplot concerning a murder at the scrap yard fail to generate sparks, but Joyce's overwhelming sense of loss is ably communicated. (June 5)
