Description
Book SynopsisIn a debut novel from Green Writers Press by Jonathan Howland, the austere beauty and high exposure of mountain adventure provide the context and the measure for what it means to be alive for climbing partners Joe Holland and Pete Hunter—until one of them isn’t. When the book opens, it’s the mid-80s. Joe Holland, the novel’s narrator, is a climber and a seeker, but mostly he’s Pete Hunter’s shadow. The two meet in college and spend the next ten years living at the base of any rock that appears scalable, most of them near Yosemite and California’s High Sierra. The joys and strains of their friendship comprise the novel’s first half. In the second, the bare bones–obsession, grief, love, and repair—come into stark relief when Pete’s grown son Will calls Joe back into climbing, into the past, and into breathless vitality.
Trade Review"You know there are people whose obsession is big-wall climbing. You may have seen the documentaries, read the articles, perhaps even read a memoir. But you've never read anything that takes you so deep inside the anchoritic psyche of helpless, abject cliff worship. The narrator is ambivalent, and supremely observant, his partner the absolutist. See Ishmael and Ahab, Sal Paradiso and Dean Moriarty. This is literary fiction of a high order, with a physical immediacy and specificity that never let up, and then a riveting next-generation denouement. The final top-out will destroy you. Climb on." -- William Finnegan, The New Yorker and author of Barbarian Days
"As a lifelong climber, climbing writer and student of mountaineering literature, I want the world to know: Jonathan Howland's Native Air is the novel that we American climbers and readers of serious fiction have been waiting for. This book is the first true literary deep dive into the austere beauty, deep friendships and high emotional cost of the lives we've all led in America's great empty spaces, tilting at mysterious windmills, chasing truths and dreams we can never quite name. Howland is the real deal -- as a climber, a writer, and a deep thinker about the human condition. Native Air belongs on the bookshelf of not just every climber but anyone whose heart registers the beauty and danger of exposure." -- Daniel Duane, author of Lighting Out, A Golden Year in Yosemite and the West and A Mouth Like Yours
