Giovanni's Gift
Bradford Morrow
"Me read? God no; I don't have time for distractions and books are just that," insists real estate emperor Graham Tate to an irritating young interloper in the midst of Bradford Morrow's languorously complex fourth novel, Giovanni's Gift. "There's nothing much in books that wouldn't better be learned out in the real world."
Them's fighting words when delivered in the midst of a contemporary western narrated by that very interloper, ardent bibliophile Grant Morgan, a 33-year-old expatriate who, in the midst of a divorce, finds himself professionally and emotionally directionless and returns to a family ranch where he spent summers as a child. Sure enough, the scene serves to underline Tate's role as the uncontested arch-villain in a work where every other character is richly shaded.
Tate's unmitigated darkness provides moments of relief in a book that will keep readers dizzy, their empathetic compasses spinning as the complex moral shadings of the residents of Ash Creek are slowly revealed. The poetic resonance of these characters and the often stunningly rendered landscape they inhabit ennoble Giovanni's Gift and allow the book to transcend a disappointingly gimmicky and unbelievable central plot mechanism.
That titular device is a ribbon-tied cigar box once owned by Giovanni Trentas, a beloved ranch hand who once worked for Grant's Aunt Edme and Uncle Henry Fulton and died in mysterious circumstances. Edme rather inexplicably presents the box to Grant when he comes to help his relatives figure out who has been disturbing their peaceful rural life with noisy night disturbances and, later, vandalism and arson. Morrow draws allusions between the cigar box and the mythical box of Pandora, having Grant read Nathaniel Hawthorne's tales of Greek mythology during his stay at the ranch.
The basic parallel is a fine one. The opening of Pandora's box led to an unleashing of wickedness upon the world, followed ultimately, by eternal hope. Similarly, when his curiousity about Giovanni is piqued by the cigar box, Grant begins to discover deceits coursing through the small town community of Ash Creek with all the unstoppable vigor of the roiling creek itself. Giovanni's grown daughter Helen, Tate's gracious wife Willa, Sherrif Noah Daiches and his half-wit brother Milland, even Aunt Edme and Uncle Henry prove to be embroiled in dangerous games.
Rather awkwardly, however, Morrow fills Giovanni's box with more than the simple impetus for curiousity. He clutters it with bits and scraps of ephemera—French cigarette papers, an eagle feather, a dance card, shreds of a document—which serve as arcane clues in an unlikely rebus that Grant gradually solves through his encounters with the townsfolk. This literal puzzle-solving proves both far-fetched and tangential. Ironically, Grant is such a beautifully drawn detective, so emotionally invested in his investigations, that readers will come away convinced he would have uncovered all of Ash Creek's hidden truths without any of Giovanni's bric-a-brac distractions.
As much as its hidden ones, Ash Creek's most obvious truths are among this novel's substantial pleasures. Morrow, as he demonstrated in his last book, Trinity Fields, is a master of western landscape, painting rich verbal pictures that linger in the mind: "Scraggly bushes cluttered the sheer ascent, and squarish blocks of stone, granite and igneous chunks, tumbled scree, jutted here and there, wild outcroppings decorated in every cranny by corsages of thorny flowering thistle and stubborn foliage."
Occasionally, Morrow becomes so passionate in his descriptions that, while their language has a beauty, they elude the mind's eye. Given a phrase like "sunset apricot light blazed like fiery glaciered crowns," even a book reviewer might agree with Graham Tate's notion that you'd do better to go see it than read about it. More often, however, the author's fine eye lets us see even mundane objects with a surveyor's perceptivity. A barber's shelf, for instance: "The polychrome bottles of tonic, oil, pomade, and the metal combs marinating in indigo liquid...standing in rows, magically doubled by their reflections in the mirror."
As he weaves subtle subtexts into his story, Morrow never mentions the state in which Ash Creek is located. In effect, he suggests, the American West is mythical turf, with powerful themes—the meaning of home, man versus nature, the perils of progress—akin to those of Pandora's ancient Greece.
One finishes Giovanni's Gift agog at the layers of meaning and the intellectual notions Morrow has managed to touch upon within the context of a warm and engrossing story. It reminds you that books are often richer than the real world.
