Gabriel's Story
By David Anthony Durham
Doubleday, $23.95
ISBN 0385498144

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David Anthony Durham's first novel, Gabriel's Story, traces the adventures of its eponymous protagonist in the post-Civil War West. Fifteen-year-old Gabriel Lynch, an African American recently transplanted to Kansas from Baltimore, finds life on his stepfather's farm grimly dull. With his friend, James (another black youth), he joins a group of cowboys driving horses to Texas.

The leader of the band, an enigmatic man named Marshall Hogg, dominates his underlings with a mercurial personality. Alternately savior and sinner, he rescues Gabriel from a potentially lethal encounter with a racist gunman but watches his men commit horrible acts of savagery. Marshall condones this behavior while commenting on his distaste for it; his is the most complex morality of all the characters, and though he remains mostly a mystery, he casts a long shadow over the story.

Gabriel observes the depravities from something of a distance, yet this detachment arises from his less-than-privileged status among the cowboys. Not only is he young and inexperienced, but his race hinders him from taking action. He and James form a friendship with Dunlop, an expatriate Scotsman with a conscience, but the three are dragged along on a spree of violence that shocks from both its premeditation and its randomness.

Durham writes with an obvious love of language. His descriptions of the western landscape resonate with a crispness that lends the setting a ripe vibrancy; buttes and rivers crackle with lively detail, the denizens of the West spring to life in full-fleshed depictions and fresh metaphors deliciously pepper the pages.

The story itself, though inventive in its wide array of personalities, follows a winding yet predictable course to its conclusion, and some of the characters smack of stereotypes. Also, Gabriel's family remains something of a cipher even at the end.

But fortunately, Durham's writing stands out as the most memorable element of the novel, and this is honest writing. Gabriel's basic integrity helps him navigate the territory of a harsh and unpredictable world. Even as his eyes witness cruelty, his heart and mind drive him forward. Out of this crucible of violence, Gabriel the boy emerges as Gabriel Lynch: hardened, no longer an innocent, but a genuinely good man whose spirit, though fictional in nature, helped to shape the West.

Michael Paulson teaches English at Penn State University.