Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  Also, I would say my background—both practical and educational—has been so varied that philosophy is only a part of it. My time as a critical care nurse enriched my life: sometimes, I consider it the most important work I’ve done, though at the time I was too busy to realize it. My undergraduate degree (after nursing school) was in economics; that too opened me up to a better way of understanding the world. And my PhD was a joint degree: I was in Columbia’s School of Public Health as well as in the philosophy department. It was the era of interdisciplinary studies, and I was fortunate to have been able to design the course of my study—no one there before had formally done anything in medical ethics.

  What are you working on next?

  Another novel, this one also inspired by a particular landscape, though it isn’t set in the desert. I know where I am, but I have no idea where I’ll end up. It’s a voyage of discovery. I’m setting forth, trying to leave things behind.

  Adapted from an interview that originally appeared at BookPage.com.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR

  DISCUSSION

  Many of the characters in Old Border Road are not called by their given names—Girl, Rose’s Daddy (the old man), the Padre, Pearl’s daughter, and Son, for instance. At the end of the novel, Katherine writes “her full and proper name.” What do you think this is meant to convey about her future?

  The Kirkus review for Old Border Road called it a “highly stylized, uniquely voiced first novel.” In what ways did both the colloquial diction and the more elevated, almost biblical language help or hinder your pleasure in reading?

  “For if not striving, what might there be but tedium?” says Katherine. How does this thought, also expressed by Rose’s Daddy, separate her from Son? Is Son a cipher, or is there power in his silence?

  Both Rose and Pearl Hart advise Katherine to overlook the philandering nature of men. How do the two women differ from each other in conducting their lives? Which is Katherine more responsive to, and what does this reveal about her own character?

  Do you think that Rose’s Daddy’s suicide was justified? Did his “sermon” influence your thinking about this question?

  How does the natural world—the landscape and weather of the Southwest—intensify or determine the human events recounted in Old Border Road? How have the landscape and climate where you live affected your life?

  What was your reaction to Katherine taking refuge with the Padre? Aside from Son’s infidelity, what do you think were the strongest immediate causes of her desire for another companion?

  How are Hartry, the hired hand, and Ham able to provide support for Katherine when the other men in her life have abandoned her? Do these characters serve to banish gender stereotypes in the novel? How do Pearl’s daughter and Katherine differ in their relationships with men?

  Ranching and rodeo require manual work and dexterity, as well as a willingness to take risks. In what ways do these efforts mirror your own work and outside interests? How do they differ?

  At the beginning of Old Border Road, Katherine is alone, and she is alone again at the end of the story. In what ways has she gained the fortitude and independence to move forward? What impact do you imagine the receipt of “some letter from some school” will have on her life?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Susan Froderberg was born in Washington State. She moved east to study medical ethics and philosophy at Columbia University, where she received her doctorate. She lives with her husband in New York City.

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  “Well written, thought provoking…. Nicholas Evans now brings readers The Brave, another first-rate story but with a decidedly different twist.”

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  “In his first novel in five years Evans displays a sure hand at drawing characters and their motivations and settings as diverse as a gloomy boarding school, glamorous Hollywood, and the wide-open spaces of the West. This should appeal to all lovers of good storytelling.”

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  THE TERROR OF LIVING

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  —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

  “This formidable fiction debut by Urban Waite unfolds in short and often all too memorably violent sequences, yet the author also allows his characters room to wrestle with private demons as the intense, often gruesome tale races toward its satisfying resolution.”

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  SAINTS AND SINNERS

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  ROOM

  A novel by Emma Donoghue

  “An astounding, terrifying novel…. It’s a testament to Donoghue’s imagination and empathy that she is able to fashion radiance from such horror.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Donoghue brings her story to a powerful close that feels exactly right. This is a truly memorable novel…. It presents an utterly unique way to talk about love.”

  —Aimee Bender, New York Times Book Review

  BEING POLITE TO HITLER

  A novel by Robb Forman Dew

  “Dew has captured, beautifully, the poetry of the everyday…. With lush, graceful language, she reminds us that much of what we consider to be ordinary in our lives, in the end, turns out to be quite extraordinary.”

  —Jim Carmin, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Highly original…. Robb Forman Dew covers both the cosmic and the quotidian as she follows a formidably intermingled group of people in the town of Washburn, Ohio…. Dew’s novels identify and describe not just a town and its people but the American mind-set at particular moments in time.”

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  THE WIFE’S TALE

  A novel by Lori Lansens

  “Mary’s odyssey of heartache and hope is not so much about finding her husband as it is about rediscovering herself.”

  —Lisa Kay Greissinger, People

  “Heartbreakingly funny and sad…. Lansens—who lived so memorably inside the heads of conjoined twins in The Girls—sketches another indelible female character here.”

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  “A backcountry Shakespeare…. The inhabitants of Daniel Woodrell’s fiction often have a streak that’s not just mean but savage; yet physical violence does not dominate his books. What does dominate is a seasoned fatalism…. Woodrell has tapped into a novelist’s honesty, and lucky for us, he’s remorseless that way.”

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  Praise for Susan Froderberg’s

  OLD BORDER ROAD

  “Old Border Road isn’t a western by any formal definition of the term, but Susan Froderberg builds on those old tropes to tell a mournful story of men and women scraping by on America’s arid frontier…. This is a western transformed by its focus on a young woman…. Katherine has a raw poetic voice that makes the tale an arresting incantation of longing and regret…. The effect is often moving and evocative…. It’s good to be reminded again that this classic American form is no one-trick pony; it’s still evolving, still turning those sepia myths into challenging new fiction.”

  —Ron Charles, Washington Post

  “This debut novel is like a big-budget western with the set-design Oscar in the bag. Everything looks authentic, dusty. Even the narrator sounds voice-over ready, her accent baked into her words…. Ms. Froderberg isn’t one to let up on the intensity; the weight of her words can feel biblical.”

  —Susannah Meadows, New York Times

  “Reminiscent of Faulkner and Stegner.”

  —Elle

  “I especially like the energy and cadences of the sentences in Old Border Road. The book catapults forward in this fearless and honest voice. It’s Katherine’s life story told her way and she is one of the most engaging narrators I’ve come across in a long time…. And Katherine is as good a listener as she is a teller.”

  —Peter Orner, Granta Online, “Best Books of 2010”

  “Susan Froderberg’s Old Border Road is a woman-finding-her-voice novel, but with none of the treacle or tropes of the genre. Froderberg writes with an elegance and originality that captivate…. The story has heart, perhaps because in Katherine we find a character to rally behind without feeling as if we’ve been manipulated into doing so…. She is spirited but humble, fallible but ultimately triumphant.”

  —Emily H. Freeman, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “In Old Border Road, Susan Froderberg’s remarkable feat of literary ventriloquism gives us two inventive and haunting voices to remember. One is that of Katherine, the young ranch bride striving for the language to fit her predicament; the other is the author’s own, a fresh dialect of talent on the fiction scene.”

  —Ivan Doig, author of Work Song

  “Ms. Froderberg superbly draws on the Sonoran Desert’s singular features to highlight Katherine’s changing emotions. Her joyful honeymoon is set in a mountain lush with ‘blue spruce, dwarf cedar, juniper’; but her marriage deteriorates as the heat wave ‘drives desert rodents and millipedes to hole in the earth, singes wings of monarchs, silences chickadees, sends cacti into dormancy, has every animal panting.’… This stark and convincing portrait of Katherine’s maturing from a ‘love-struck girl’ to a self-reliant woman is captured in a splendor of naturalistic detail. Katherine’s coming-of-age story is given additional dimensions by the background drama of the drought and the need to provide water to an expanding desert population…. The hard lesson of Old Border Road is that there are endless enticements that lead men to dishonor.”

  —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

  “Set against a stifling drought, events take on their own slow-burning heat…. Froderberg’s writing… achieves the sublime.”

  —The New Yorker

  “This remarkable debut novel, the story of a girl, begins with an adobe house and a road that runs south to north…. Susan Froderberg keeps circling back to beginnings… she starts Katherine’s new life again and again, dashing hopes, revealing the meanness in Son and the difficulty of making a living from the dry earth.”

  —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

  “This simple story is beautifully told. It takes place in a distinct landscape, alive with intense color, dense texture, and sharp sound…. Froderberg writes movingly of the haze of happiness that is the honeymoon. ‘It is rapturous and ordinary, detailed and blurry, seeming to go on and on for a long time, and it is too soon over in the way all time can be.’ More moving is her description of how time moves later, after the betrayals. ‘Days and nights go by, regardless. The days are but a form to prop us, a stay to prevent our undoing, the nights but a measure of distance and passing.’ ”

  —Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

  “I read Susan Froderberg’s fine and beguiling first novel a little bit, and a little bit more, and suddenly found myself in a beautiful and heartbreaking swirl of story and life and language and could not stop. The world therein is raw and urgent and yet adorned with element: burning and cooling, light and dark, droughty weather, delicate seeds greening, our perilous existence, our enduring sufferance.”

  —Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse

  “Told in a vernacular that mixes biblical grandiosity and down-home grit…. A southwest gothic debut that fans of Cormac McCarthy should adore.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Susan Froderberg uses striking, poetic language to convey the parched landscape and internal stagnation… A conjuring of the Old West through the lens of modern times, with uncommon and wonderful landscape and flora terms… sprinkled through the narrative to bring this dreamscape to life.”

  —Jenny Shank, New West

  “Employing a dreamy stream of consciousness evocative of Virginia Woolf, this debut novel conjures a seventeen-year-old newlywed from Arizona who realizes that her husband doesn’t nearly live up to her expectations.”

  —Ms. Magazine

  “A sunbaked exploration of love and pain in the American Southwest, charts the turbulent ups and downs of a marriage.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “The rural Arizona landscape echoes in every word of the sparse, beautiful prose…. An exciting new writer to watch.”

  —Rebecca Shapiro, BookPage

  “Froderberg’s novel is deliciously poetic, surprisingly timeless—though set in the present day—and undeniably western.”

  —Julie Hunt, Booklist

  “Froderberg’s shimmering debut, set against the dusty, barren backdrop of the American Southwest, explores the joys and consequences of young love.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Froderberg is truly Cormac McCarthy’s literary offspring, echoing his hot, haunting brand of southwest essence, desert landscape, and gothic narrative elixir…. Although set in contemporary times, there is a timeless quality about Old Border Road…. I was exceptionally moved when I came to the last line of the story, a sentence that touched me with its purity, subtlety, and pith.”

  —Betsey Van Horn, MostlyFiction.com

  “Old Border Road fills some gaps in the Cormac McCarthy school of writing with Froderberg’s plucky young female narrator…. The novel’s artful language is beguiling.”

  —Vikas Turakhia, Cleveland Plain Dealer

  Contents

  FRONT COVER IMAGE

  WELCOME

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  ONE: A HOME TO GO HOME TO

  TWO: ROSE’S DADDY

  THREE: PEARL HART

  FOUR: THE PADRE

  FIVE: THE SERMON

  SIX: HARTRY

  SEVEN: DAUGHTER PEARL

  EIGHT: THE QUECHAN

  NINE: AT THE TOUCH OF A HAT

  TEN: THE BREACH

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  A CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN FRODERBERG

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BACK BAY BOOKS

  AVAILABLE FROM MULHOLLAND BOOKS

  PRAISE FOR SUSAN FRODERBERG’S OLD BORDER ROAD

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2010 by Susan Froderberg

  Reading group guide copyright © 2011 by Susan Froderberg and Little, Brown and Company

  Cover design by Nneka Bennett. Copyright ©
2011 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Cover art: Sisse Brimberg / National Geographic / Getty Images

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company

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  Second e-book edition: November 2011

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  The author gratefully acknowledges the editors of Conjunctions and Prairie Schooner, where parts of this novel first appeared, in different form.