In the Shadow of the Plague
“Solbach presents a novel about family, the environment, and real estate in the Pacific Northwest.
Delbert Killian is a rather spry man in his 70s, living in the time after the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. When he is not hanging out with old friends, he tends to be off managing one of the several properties he owns in the Eugene, Oregon, area. The novel also tells the stories of various people in Delbert’s orbit, including his son, Jason, who would like a loan from his dad so that he can buy a tire shop. Jason has a chance meeting in a laundromat with someone he knew in high school; she’s now a sex worker who’s upfront about her intentions: She wants Jason for sex, but has plans to eventually settle down with another woman. There’s also Sandra, Delbert’s ex-wife, who’s taken up with a wealthy man named Herman. The source of Herman’s funds is a mystery to her, although it later becomes clear that he’s not exactly an upstanding citizen. As these and other characters enter and leave Delbert’s life, his main concern is something called the Benson Trust, for which he is the successor trustee. Benson died the previous year, and Delbert’s instructions are to attempt to get the land that the deceased left behind into the Willamette National Forest. If he fails to do so, the property will be clear-cut, but it’s a complicated affair that requires Delbert to take into consideration the wants and needs of several different parties, including people who are currently living on the land in question.
Different characters take turns narrating, but Delbert always remains at the heart of the story. Solbach brings him to life with such details as his love for his pet cat and his environmental concerns about “the new normal great Western drought”; indeed, Solbach makes worries about the state of the environment a recurring theme of the novel. At one point, a woman who’s staunchly against the idea of clear-cutting exclaims, “Fucking tree farms are the apologia of clear-cut, nothing lives. All dies!” As such, readers will feel immersed in the Pacific Northwest setting, which never feels sketchy or generic. However, the book’s detailing of the finer points of real estate transactions, while also immersive, don’t have as much dramatic punch…Nevertheless, the text incorporates plenty of conflict, and even moments of violence, because as tranquil as a place like Eugene might seem, it’s also portrayed as a place where people live, die, and steal. There’s plenty of treachery to be found—and not all of it comes from ex-spouses.
An Oregon-set drama with lively, memorable characters…”
—Kirkus Reviews
Stonepacker’s Gold, and Fathers
Solbach presents an interconnected novel and novella set in the American West.
In Stonepacker’s Gold, it is 1920. Willie Urgang has just arrived in Salt Lake City from Kansas. Willie is 19 and leaving behind a failed marriage back home; he has come to Salt Lake to work for his uncle. On the train to Utah, Willie meets a youngster named Archie who is an enthusiastic spokesperson about Mormon beliefs. After Willie has settled into his new life, he comes across Archie again—this time, the young man is in danger of being killed by two ruffians. Willie intervenes and manages to help, though Archie is wounded. Archie is brought to an odd place where a man named Enos, who introduces himself as Archie’s uncle, seems to be in charge. But pressing questions—about what the two men wanted with Archie, and why no one was going to contact the authorities about the situation—remain unanswered. As Willie reflects, “These people frightened him.” It becomes apparent that Enos and other competing parties are after some gold plates with ancient writing on them. The writing, supposedly done by a Mormon, may be an embarrassment to the Mormon church or a “worthy addition” to their canon. The second, shorter work, Fathers, follows Roger, age 33, the great-grandson of Willie Urgang. It is just after the Dotcom Crash, and Roger’s adoptive father, Marcus, has had a stroke. Roger has recently lost his job in San Francisco, so he heads out to Marcus’ farm in Kansas. There, he will come face to face with incidents from his past, including the death of his biological father.
Fathers excels in its use of specificity—both the characters and their environment in Kansas are vividly realized without leaning on stereotypes. For instance, Marcus may be a farmer who raises “beefalo,” but he reveals deeper dimensions with his left-leaning views and vehement refusal to allow any hunting on his property. His land is brought to life by details like the Greenhorn Limestone posts that were installed in the 1800s, when timber was scarce; they “march across the landscape like square headed mannequins, yellowish tan, stained dark where wire has rusted on them.” By contrast, the pull of Stonepacker’s Gold comes more from the plot than the main players. (Why are so many people interested in these gold plates? What are they willing to do to get them?) While Fathers features a fairly small group of characters that is easy to keep track of, Stonepacker’s Gold’s cast is expansive. Various individuals enter the picture quickly, including a man from Willie’s hometown named Helmut Schmidt and a Pinkerton detective, Charlie Flowers. Soon, Willie is on the town with a love interest, Glencora Dalton, and Archie is out in the wilderness with someone named Oswald and a dog called Treelop; it may take the reader a few pages to fully process who these people are. While these characters are not as vividly drawn as those in Fathers, the mystery about the unusual items at the heart of the story holds the reader’s attention. After all, “the value of the item hinges on more than the price of gold,” and the excitement comes in seeing how that value will manifest.
Two unique narratives that showcase a prowess for description.
—Kirkus Reviews
So Glad I’m Glad I’m Glad
Solbach’s novel follows an itinerant California textbook salesman and LSD aficionado’s journey through the social world of the 1960s.
In 1967 San Francisco, Barnaby “Burns” Sundin drifts through the hippie Haight-Ashbury district. He earns a living by collecting rent on behalf of his friend, Ashley, who provides cheap apartments and “free housing for the impure.” The rest of his time is spent reclining at Golden Gate Park, where “costumes mingle serenely with pot smoke and Eucalyptus shadows,” avoiding his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Rita, dropping acid, watching “nymphets,” and sniffing tobacco from a snuffbox made of goat horn. An unsettling conversation in the park with a suicidal, snaggle-toothed alcoholic who calls himself Ahriman leaves Burns ruminating on his life’s direction; to the dismay and confusion of his Haight-Ashbury friends, he “whack[s] his hair, shave[s] himself bald,” and applies for a trainee position in the University of California system. The administrators are less than impressed with his spotty educational record (five colleges attended before graduating from the University of Kansas) and previous employment at academic publisher Artha House, and they accuse him of being a plant sent by the Weathermen. Burns, undeterred, leaps into a dizzying affair with his friend Ergstrom’s ex-girlfriend Jane, followed by a rapidly intensifying relationship with Laki, a redheaded, militant vegetarian named for Iceland’s most active volcano. Burns moves with Laki down to Laguna Beach when he snags a job as a travelling salesman with academic publisher Brownstone-Hill. She “digs the weather” but hates her job as an architect’s assistant and feels trapped in a housewife role she never signed up for. As Laki increasingly unravels psychologically, Burns uneasily balances his job in the capitalist machine of academic publishing with his ever-intensifying LSD habit and spending long evenings with his friend Markov, Markov’s pregnant girlfriend, Kalitri, and other associates who bring the beatnik spirit to Southern California.
The novel’s greatest strength—and frustration—is its prose, which takes a meandering path through Burns’ equally circuitous life, revealing plot points in glimmers and glimpses rather than through linear declaration. Solbach cleaves closely to Burns’ point of view, writing in a quasi-hallucinogenic stream of consciousness: “Sips coffee glad for the strong 12 volt headlights tunneling through fog patches wet under roadside eucalyptus makes him again wonder whether Ahriman was referring to the trees with all that muttering about Australia.” At times, the author shifts (without warning) into the heads of Ergstrom, Laki, or Kalitri, building out the story’s complex social world. Readers will have to get on board with the novel’s somewhat glacial pace—there are many philosophical discussions without significant political stakes (Burns, Jane notes, is “not the joining type,” having never even committed to the Boy Scouts). The work is dense and poetic at a sentence level…The story is a loving homage to a scene and an era…
A stunningly stylized novel…
—Kirkus Reviews
David Solbach — Author 