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BOOKMONGER
Pyle’s debut novel
a tonic for dark
days of winter
hile Pacific North-
westerners like
to claim Robert
Michael Pyle as their own,
the Grays River resident,
award-winning author,
lepidopterist and founder of
the Xerces Society (which
champions conservation of
invertebrates and their hab-
itats) originally hailed from
Colorado, and it is Colorado
that Pyle uses for the prima-
ry setting of his first novel.
From the opening page,
it is immediately clear that
“Magdalena Mountain” seeks
to appeal to all of the senses
— Pyle saturates paragraph
after paragraph with zesty
colors, aromas, textures,
tastes, sounds and perspec-
tives not regularly shared.
He salutes bards and
thinkers (some of them fic-
tional) from other times and
places — casually seasoning
conversations with their bon
mots or lines of verse, and in
other cases quoting them at
length.
He pays fond homage to
the rigors and peculiarities
of academia (particularly
Yale, where the author
earned his Ph.D., focusing
on butterfly eco-geography).
But mostly, Pyle seduces
his readers into pondering
the world around them.
He crafts this story around
three fascinating but elusive
Magdalenas: in the Colorado
Rockies, there is the stony
prominence of Magdalena
W
“Magdalena
Mountain”
By Robert Michael Pyle
Counterpoint
400 pp
$16.95
Mountain — too massive
to comprehend in toto; then
there is the rare Magdalena
butterfly, which undergoes its
miracle of metamorphosis on
that peak’s highest, harshest
slopes; and finally there is
Mary, a woman in crisis, who
yearns for a place to find
herself.
Pyle doesn’t stop there.
James Mead is a young
graduate student in search
of a research subject and
love (not necessarily in
that order) — he’s a central
character. There’s also an
aggregation of sincerely
pantheist pseudo-monks
squabbling over the idea of
expanding their community
to include women. And there
are vanloads of entomolo-
gists taking advantage of the
short glorious summer in the
mountains to net butterflies
and quaff beer.
This tale is sprawling
and captivating and occa-
sionally befuddling. There
is a phone book’s worth of
characters to keep track of,
and there are some pretty
highbrow conversations, too.
While the author is fairly
deft about juggling story
lines, readers will need to
exercise patience before they
are rewarded with seeing
where all of these lead. But
over the course of these
400 pages, motivations and
revelations gradually take
shape, and all the dots begin
to connect.
It may be his excellent
training as an ecologist that
compels Pyle to demon-
strate how all life forms are
interrelated. While this may
be a great universal truth, it
is also the thing that most
obviously pegs “Magdalena
Mountain” as a first novel.
There is a chapter near the
end that tries too hard to ex-
plain all things to all people.
It is unwieldy, perhaps even
downright comical — there
are so many characters
crowding into the scene
that I half-expected a fire
marshal to come in and shut
the place down.
But isn’t this what we’ve
come to expect of Pyle’s
writings and insights? Gen-
erous, joyful, a tad eccentric
and a ton exuberant.
If the end-of-year
doldrums are beginning to
get you down, “Magdale-
na Mountain” is a surefire
tonic.
The Bookmonger is Bar-
bara Lloyd McMichael, who
writes this weekly column fo-
cusing on the books, authors
and publishers of the Pacific
Northwest. Contact her at
bkmonger@nwlink.com.
DAMIAN MULINIX/EO MEDIA
Grays River author Robert Michael Pyle.