Groundtruth tells the story of Chele Cruz: orphan without family, prodigy, mentor. Wise child. Tamer of feral horses and feral children. But Chele is a little feral himself. He wanders, rebels, drops out of school. He goes riding with the precocious Tania – nymphet, gangster child, trouble. And a reckless search for his prostitute mother ends in disaster, broken faith, and banishment from the orphanage sanctuary of his childhood.

 

It tells the story of the McKeanes – heirs to a hard-used back country ranch, a legacy of delusion and obsession, and convictions of manifest destiny now matured into a darker strain of fatalism. Their schemes unravel at the moment of fruition. They unleash calamity. And they adjust to failure by immediately turning their attention to new and more outrageous hopes.

 

Separate stories, parallel histories and destinies. They converge in Chele’s journey of exile through mountains and canyons, the ancestral territory of the McKeanes, where he encounters pyromaniacal ghosts of his childhood, flesh-and-blood predators, and McKeanes both living and dead. Where beneath the shadow of a giant smoke plume and in the company of 2000 sheep and a wandering matriarch, he assembles out of of broken strands of genealogy and coincidence an origin myth all his own.

 

Groundtruth is an adventure story, a coming-of-age story, a love story, and a family epic. It’s about fire ecology and family ecology, exile and displacement, and cycles of degeneration and restoration on personal, familial, and landscape scales. It’s both dark and funny, in a weird way even optimistic – a story of hardship and courage, of calamity, resurgence, and redemption.

 

This novel took a long time to write and the world has changed a lot since I began it. So maybe it’s a story out of step with these strange and harrowing times. Or maybe it’s a story especially worth reading in such times.