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When we consider the idea of the wayfaring stranger, we may first turn to Jeremiah, in which the tribe of Israel implores God to stay with them in troublous times and not to be as a wayfaring man who pauses for one night, then leaves. The idea of the wayfaring stranger is also preserved in the American folksong, in which the figure of the rambling man becomes a figure for all living souls who pass through their lives and come at last to death. It is this second reference that is most akin to the central characters in James Lee Burke's new novel.
Like the restless unemployed Americans of the depression, WAYFARING STRANGER sprawls. It sprawls from California to Louisiana, to Houston, San Antonio, and Wichita Falls. It sprawls to Mexico and to Paris, from a movie set to a high-society cocktail party to a Nazi concentration camp. Its intent is to follow family ties of father and son through multiple generations, and to follow as well the heights and depth of romantic love, sexual love, love of country, love of power and money.
Those intentions are mighty big. Burke tackles them through the figure of first-person narrator Weldon Holland, who is the grandson of his character in numerous other novels: lawman Hackberry Holland. Early in the novel, the boy Weldon speaks to the members of the Barrow Gang, who camp out near his family home while they are on the lam. It was just days before Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed. While the boy Weldon knows the Barrow Gang to be criminals as they sprang an imprisoned confederate from jail, that they chose a fiery death over imprisonment gains them, in the boy's mind, a kind of nobility and loyalty worth emulating.
The novel follows Weldon to the Ardennes and back, where he rescues a woman from a concentration camp and marries her, and where his commanding officer decorates him as a hero for saving a fellow soldier from behind enemy lines. When these four, Weldon Holland, his new wife Rosita Lowenstein, fellow-soldier Hershel Pine, and Major Lloyd Fincher, ret'd, return to the United States, Pine buys welding rigs from the defunct Nazi state and uses these to create oil pipelines that don't leak. Weldon is his partner, and Finch comes to lend them money. Because Pine's new wife, Linda Gail, desires to climb the social ladder, parts of this novel unfold in cocktail parties and in the most expensive neighborhoods in Houston. As the two couples become successful, they hit dry holes, then pull themselves back up again; however, Big Bidness takes notice. At this moment in the narrative, the work changes from being a saga of American success to exploring the reach of power and money in post-war America. Linda Gail is seduced by a film-maker who says that she is beautiful. Portrayed as an ignorant backwoods girl driven by hatred of her roots, she trades sex for Hollywood success. The FBI, in several guises, begins trying to ferret out Rosita's background, imprisoning her because her parents in Spain had been Communists. Fincher, perhaps under pressure from the powers that be, lures Weldon and Rosita into a trap. When Rosita is incarcerated in an insane asylum and threatened with electroshock therapy, Weldon, like Bonnie and Clyde, is placed on the other side of the law, where love triumphs over legalities.
This plot summary gives Burke's novel short shrift. There are moments of real poetry here. The car that Bonnie and Clyde were driving when Weldon was a boy keeps resurfacing: The getaway car. Burke keeps touching on the area between crime and legality, exploring what real evil might be, and whether the long arm of the law is always allied with good. As Hershel and Weldon make their way through these pages, all of those who tried to entrap them or who know too much are mysteriously killed. Burke has one character note that all of them are like the wayfarers of the Canterbury Tales, hoping that something can protect them from the bubonic plague. In THE WAYFARING STRANGER, the Black Death in post-war America is greed.
§ Dr. Cathy Downs teaches American Literature at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. She is a fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, July 2014
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