Thin Men of Haddam

Author's first novel [From front jacket flap] Méndez: a chicano, a ranch foreman thanks to fortunate circumstance, intellectual, and ambitious for himself and his people. Manuelo: his unemployed cousin, desperate, angry, and bent on avenging the wrongs he has suffered. Bond: ranch hand, buffoon, tale-spinner, a former preacher whose congregation now is Méndez. Houston: a Chicagoan who hopes to rebuild his life on the ranch he has just inherited. Four men who dream of the sky but are bound to the earth, who have cast themselves in roles but do not control the script, around whom C. W. Smith has built his remarkable first novel, Thin Men of Haddam. It is a rich and sweeping story, set in the Southwest, impregnated with regional humor and color, and distinguished by a sure sense of characterization and plotting. The novel is constructed of stories told by its characters and flashbacks involving Méndez, the protagonist, who struggles to reconcile his dreams with his hatred for the Anglos who alone can satisfy them, and to satisfy both his self-interest and his desire to be a martyr for his people. Its tension ever building, the novel moves inexorably to its climactic scene, a dead-of-night manhunt ¡n the rugged, semiarid hills of West Texas. Readers of Thin Men of Haddam will find echoes of Faulkner and Cervantes, but Smith is his own man, a writer whose major talents are fully displayed in this big, stemwinding novel of extraordinary authority, wit, and dramatic power.