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Overview
Gabriel's Story recounts the adventures and trials of a pioneer family in the late 1870s. At the center of the story is Gabriel, a young man who moves reluctantly from the urban North with his mother and younger brother to join his stepfather, a homesteader in Kansas.
While his mother and brother accept the reduced circumstances of their new life, Gabriel looks upon the primitive one-room sod house, the meager crops, and the endless fields of grass with loathing. Filled with memories of his deceased father and the dreams they shared, Gabriel decides to run away and become a cowboy. However, his search for excitement brings trouble and danger as he encounters a host of unsavory characters while testing himself against this brutally unforgiving new landscape.
In a novel in which place itself is a character, David Anthony Curham re-creates the harshness of life on the plains and the desperate struggles of a family trying to eke out a meager existence while building a future for itself against seemingly insurmountable odds. His portrait of Gabriel masterfully captures a coming-of-age under extreme circumstances and presents a rare look at the role black cowboys played in settling the West.
Like Colson Whitehead, Durham is an astonishgly gifted African-American writer whose work crosses the boundaries of color by dealing in universal truths. His remarkable book not only opens up the hidden history of the West, where a fourth of all cowboys were black, but triumphs in its language and vision to reveal an exciting new talent.
Synopsis
Gabriel's Story recounts the adventures and trials of a pioneer family in the late 1870s. At the center of the story is Gabriel, a young man who moves reluctantly from the urban North with his mother and younger brother to join his stepfather, a homesteader in Kansas.
While his mother and brother accept the reduced circumstances of their new life, Gabriel looks upon the primitive one-room sod house, the meager crops, and the endless fields of grass with loathing. Filled with memories of his deceased father and the dreams they shared, Gabriel decides to run away and become a cowboy. However, his search for excitement brings trouble and danger as he encounters a host of unsavory characters while testing himself against this brutally unforgiving new landscape.
In a novel in which place itself is a character, David Anthony Curham re-creates the harshness of life on the plains and the desperate struggles of a family trying to eke out a meager existence while building a future for itself against seemingly insurmountable odds. His portrait of Gabriel masterfully captures a coming-of-age under extreme circumstances and presents a rare look at the role black cowboys played in settling the West.
Like Colson Whitehead, Durham is an astonishgly gifted African-American writer whose work crosses the boundaries of color by dealing in universal truths. His remarkable book not only opens up the hidden history of the West, where a fourth of all cowboys were black, but triumphs in its language and vision to reveal an exciting new talent.
USA Today - Bob Minzesheimer
Gabriel Story, a wise and beautifully written debut novel by David Anthony Durham. Its a Western adventure with overtones of the Old Testament.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Debut novelist David Anthony Durham mines new territory in the literature of the American West with his searing portrait of a young black man's coming of age on a Kansas homestead in Gabriel's Story, a fast-paced, historically accurate adventure story in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy.Bob Minzesheimer
Gabriel Story, a wise and beautifully written debut novel by David Anthony Durham. Its a Western adventure with overtones of the Old Testament.— USA Today
Patrick Henry Bass
David Anthony Durham makes a sensational debut with Gabriel's Story, a lush and atmospheric historical novel that races the unforgettable odyssey of a prairie family in the mid-nineteenth century.— Essence
From The Critics
THE LITERAL American West is the condo-stacked Pacific coast, yet there remains in our continental consciousness a mythical "West," a vast open space where imagination can roam. These two first novels are Westerns: Gabriel's Story a cowboy tale about a post-Civil War black youth who journeys to the heart of whiteness in the Arizona desert; America's Children a pioneer story about a World War II-era Jewish scientist—Robert Oppenheimer—who fathered the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and exploded it at White Sands. David Anthony Durham and James Thackara are Americans living in Europe, and their books provide a European critique of New World innocence, Americans' hope that goodness can make even a Western desert bloom. Both novelists reshape pre-American genres—the heroic quest, the tragic fall—to give their densely historical fictions a timeless quality.When Durham's Gabriel is fifteen, his mother and stepfather take him from a comfortable life in Baltimore to a sod hut on the Kansas plain, where the boy attacks the earth with an ax and his bare hands. Given the chance to escape farming with a band of cowboys, Gabriel and his young friend James join up. The group is led by Marshall, a fast-talking white man, and Caleb, his silent half-black half-brother. Not long into their trek toward Texas, Gabriel realizes the cowboys are horse thieves, who turn into rapists and murderers. Unable to leave the ironically named Marshall and his gang, Gabriel and James are pursued across western borders for their presumed complicity in the gang's crimes and for their color.
Because the novel is titled Gabriel's Story, it's no surprisethat Gabriel ultimately escapes the outlaws, makes a heroic journey home and tells part of his tale to his family. But Durham knows evil is not shed by telling, so he brings Marshall and Caleb to Kansas, the hunted now hunting Gabriel. Pervaded by Biblical allusions, including Gabriel's name, the novel ends with an Old Testament rigor and righteousness.
Durham has an ancient Israelite's knowledge of the desert, its mirages and badlands, beauty and threat. His language is King James plain—and poetic. The plot of Gabriel's Story is somewhat schematic in its stages of departure, initiation and return, and while Marshall sounds more like Flannery O'Connor's theological misfits than a cowpoke, Durham does not romanticize the West. Nor does he demonize it. His West is a testing ground where human emotions as old as humanity reveal themselves. Although Gabriel's Story has been compared to Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, Durham is more like William Faulkner on horseback. Rather than McCarthy's sometimes hardwired aggression, Durham focuses on acculturated racism—against Indians, blacks, Mexicans. The result is a morally complicated, socially nuanced story of American violence and its discontents. Told with great economy and restraint, it is a very promising debut.