Captivating life phases play out in 'A Richer Dust'

AMY BOAZ

A Richer Dust
By Amy Boaz
Permanent Press, 213 pp., $26

The light, air, and landscape of New Mexico have long beckoned to artists and writers. In 1928, novelist D. H. Lawrence rhapsodized, "In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico . . . a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new." He had journeyed there from England in 1924 with his German wife, Frieda, and the painter Dorothy Brett, envisioning a utopian community in the desert. Their experiences inspire Amy Boaz's debut novel, "A Richer Dust."

Abe Bronstone, the charismatic Lawrence figure, views himself and his followers as latter-day Pilgrims, starting afresh in a new land, escaping the evils of war, industrialism, and sexual inequality. We see him and Vera, his earthy, willful wife - and their epic quarrels - through the eyes of Doll, the novel's narrator.

If Abe and Vera are somewhat larger-than-life characters, Doll, based on Brett, is decidedly life-size: plain, meek, and hard of hearing. Born into the English aristocracy, raised by nannies, she has led a lonely, constricted life. Her parents notice her only to lament her meager marital prospects; her London art-school friends call her "the Virgin Aunt." As if to deflect criticism, Doll is quick to mock herself ("the girl without hearing, beauty, or chin"). While Abe and Vera give the novel its moments of high drama, it is Doll's unglamorous story that endows it with heart.

The narrative interweaves three periods of Doll's life: her Victorian childhood and bohemian life in London during the 1910s; her experiences settling with Abe and Vera in Taos in the 1920s; and, finally, her triumphant old age in the early 1960s, when she glories in her first full-fledged love affair, with a much younger man.

Boaz does not employ elaborate period detail to evoke the past. Her depictions of how life was lived are telling in their brevity; she gets to essences, as when Doll recalls her father: "He stepped out each morning in his high hat and stiff collar tied with an ascot. . . . He had rarely seen his children growing up, and he knew less and less of his wife. If there was another way of life to be lived, he hadn't done it, didn't know it, and he felt secretly rueful." Doll shows both her empathy and her desire not to share her father's fate.

Yet even among her fellow rebels Doll is still the misfit, still alone. She does not indulge in brittle sophistication, like the art-school crowd, or high-minded abstraction, like Abe. Describing her new home in Taos, Doll's voice is very much her own - sincere, unaffected, eager: "I liked my little shed - I wanted dearly to keep it. . . . I had given up my fancy flat in Bloomsbury with its pretty mantelpiece and French doors. . . . I had said goodbye and left all that. And here I swept and knocked out the cobwebs, pounded smooth the dirt floor. . . . In time I would hang our artwork." She celebrates her rugged new existence, the room it provides to paint freely and to find a family of kindred spirits.

A peaceful life of work and love in beautiful surroundings proves elusive. Still, as conflict and disillusion tear apart the "ideal" community, Doll soldiers on and tries to stay loyal to her dreams. Taught since childhood to see herself as inconsequential, this diffident woman turns out to be quite remarkable: adventurous, independent, and smart enough to seize happiness where she can.

Judith Maas is a freelance writer and editor.