This is a novel novel. In its novelty—a book without a central character, or with an absent central character—it forces us to think more broadly about its issues. We become just one of many whose lives have been indirectly touched by the life of one anorexic girl we hardly know. As its title implies, the novel belongs to the town, and to America. Peopled with characters worthy of Faulkner—certainly the last story is as baldly humorous as Faulkner's comic moments—this is not just a story, but a history. From working ranches to rodeos, from the stage coach to the internet, this novel makes a significant place for itself in what is fast becoming the Literature of the New West.

But her second encounter with a rattlesnake was close-up, and when she heard its electric buzz coming, seemingly, from the ground right at her feet, like a thousand cicadas gathered into a tight, resonant ball, she was jolted into a stillness so profound the earth's basalt and granite seemed to shift between her heartbeats. When she came out of that stillness, through no conscious choice, she saw the snake ten feet away, mottled brown in the brown grass: the muscular coiling, the glittering points of its eyes, the thin tongue raking the air: a singular thing, distinct, but an evocation of the world, too: almost just grass, but starkly and awfully not. She stood there, stood there, stood there, until the snake finally seeped away like liquid coiled into a shape tht lost that shape and was gone, soaked into the ground. Even then she stood for long minutes before finally backing up, keeping her eyes on the place the snake had been, then finally fleeing. On that run back to the house she distrusted every footfall. Once inside, she locked the door. But light leaking under it betrayed a thin crack.