Not since THE PICTURE SHOW has a novel captured adolescent life-at-loose-ends with such cleareyed sympathy and quiet power. Tracy and Eddie are nineteen, out of high school

and not going to college, living in Gallup, New

Mexico with little to do aud nowhere to go. Even

their love for each other seems to drift without a

destination or a future. Western Motel opens

when Eddic, "the master of disastcr," suggests al-

most casually that the two of them forge a suicide

pact--and Tracy, as much to avoid the subject as

to deal with it, assents. As they move through the

day toward their midnight rendezvous in a room

of the motel where Tracy works, the novel gathers

tension with the incremental power of a building

wave. We follow Tracy and Eddie to their self-

imposed confrontatiou with death and its remark-

able aftermath, along the way meeting a world full

of people as brilliantly realized as thev: Tracy s

best friend Suzanne, a confidante blithely unaware

of anything except her own exciting plan to move

in with her boyfriend; Eddie s half-brother Ronnie,

who swaggers through town like the tinpot ruler

of an insignificanf principality; Cal Mundy, who

returns to Gallup telling big-time stories about

Los Angeles, where he is small-time indeed; and

Tracy s father, a comic who failed long ago at

both comedy and fatherhood, but who shines like

a beacon to his lost daughter. Subtle and never unsure of its touch,Western Motel is an unforgettable debut.