A strong woman in a fragile Oregon frontier

"The Hearts of Horses"

by Molly Gloss

Houghton Mifflin, 304 pp., $24

Molly Gloss opens her latest novel with this no-nonsense line: "In those days, even before the war had swept up all the young men from the ranches, there were girls who came through the country breaking horses." Reading "The Hearts of Horses" is like hearing about the adventures of 19-year-old Martha Lessen from one of her straight-shooting neighbors, over a cup of coffee brewed on a wood-burning stove.

Martha, who "gentles" horses rather than breaking them, contracts to do several months' work over the fall and winter of 1917, riding from corral to corral across the uncompromising Central Oregon landscape. Martha's a big woman at 5'-11", shy around people, but sure of herself in the saddle.

She's a good judge of horses, able to tell the untrustworthy from those only superficially scarred by bad treatment. Her assessments of her fellow humans are sometimes inaccurate but always based on common sense: She has no use for a boastful hired hand who shorts his employer's stock of feed; she yearns for the old-fashioned home comforts of a pair of elderly sisters, early settlers on the land; she scents danger in the alcoholic binges of a ne'er-do-well farmer, and the possibility of heartbreak in the attentions of a soft-spoken cowboy. An itinerant worker new to the area, Martha slowly becomes part of its social milieu.

Gloss balances her heroine's skittish innocence with the unnamed narrator's voice, the voice of experience. Often it addresses us directly, from the perspective of the nine decades that have passed since the novel's events, as in that first line, or again at the start of Chapter 14: "Some of the fellows homesteading up and down the valley in those years were such poor farmers they could hardly raise Cain."

Yet plain speaking still leaves room for lyricism. Tartly unsentimental depictions of cold-water baths and ptomaine poisoning fit naturally together with accounts of skating parties on pristine frozen lakes, dances under kerosene lantern chandeliers, and other pleasures lost to progress.

While conversing with her cowboy, Martha recalls a childhood plan of camping quietly "until the wild horses got over being afraid of her and came out of their hiding places, and in her daydream she rode them bareback without a bridle, guiding just with her knees and heels and her voice, and she never came down from the mountain."

This idealized version of the West, Martha comes to understand, is being made to vanish before her eyes by the very people holding on to it. It's an illusion, a fiction.

Gloss, a Portland native, is deeply familiar with that elusive frontier. Two of her previous books, "The Jump-off Creek" (1989) and "Wild Life" (2001), are set in the Pacific Northwest during the days of the first white settlers. "Wild Life" won the James Tiptree Jr. Award for feminist science fiction; the author's additional forays into SF include "The Dazzle of Day," a novel of pioneers migrating to another planet, and the Hugo Award-nominated short story "Lambing Season."

Like Carol Emshwiller and Kathleen Alcalá, two other women writing Westerns and SF (both ostensibly male genres), Gloss ignores boundaries instead of defying them. The mythic and the mundane are one. So her re-creation of a romantic past and its irrecoverable dreams feels solid, rooted in the everyday of long ago, palpable as the curve of a china mug in your hand. But the places described with such offhand matter-of-factness in "The Hearts of Horses" — Elwha County and Little Bird Woman Creek and Ipsoot Pass — appear in no atlas. It's an Oregon of the mind Gloss takes her readers to, one that evanesces with her narrator's imaginary breath.