The Blind Corral: by Ralph Beer (Viking: $16.95; 229 pp.)

“The Blind Corral,” Ralph Beer’s first novel, represents in many ways a type of male romantic fantasy. A wounded veteran returns, after treatment in an Army psychiatric hospital, to the Montana ranch on which he grew up with his father, Smoke; his grandfather, Harley, and his brother, Summerfield. He intends to sojourn only a few weeks before emigrating to British Columbia to join his true love. But he discovers, as he delays his departure to care for the dying Harley, that his love is truly the land of his fathers.

The course of Jackson Heckethorne’s coming-of-age is strewn with the conventions of modern male myth: the venerated older brother killed in Vietnam. Good guys (ranchers in pearl Stetsons) and bad guys (developers in brand-new brown Resistals). The night on the town culminating in the obligatory barroom brawl, recounted in a manic tone that jars with the book’s general reflectiveness. Even Annie, the good ol’ girl from the next ranch who, though she mounts her horse “like a man,” fills “her bib overalls in just the right places” and is “good-looking in a way you don’t see much anymore, kind of rough, honest-homely, and pretty all wrapped together.”

But the conventions aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem. Jackson has been wounded not in the Highlands where Summerfield died but at Ft. Sill during artillery practice. Some of the good guys are selling out to the bad guys for good reasons, like medical bills to pay and families to feed. One of the bad guys, a helicopter pilot whose careless flying causes Smoke to break his leg, later offers Smoke a ride; and from his vantage point “right over Casey Peak,” Smoke says, “I could see they hadn’t meant any harm.” Even Annie turns out to be other than she seems.

Clearly, Beer is unafraid to skew romantic expectation in order to reveal, at the stress points, the ambiguities that underlie genuinely moral acts. Jackson’s evolving determination to keep the ranch is itself suspect: “The restlessness to hit the road . . . seemed diminished, and that nagged at me. It worried me to be content with what had once seemed so empty.” In the face of the city’s sprawl, he wonders “if what was happening here was also spreading across the entire West. And if it was, where would I go? What place could I find that would take me in as this one had?” He has been both taken in--given a home--and taken in--fooled, maybe even cheated. His task will be to live out both possibilities.

Skillful editing could have sharpened the edges of this intriguing vision. Too often, fussy details (“I tied my halter lead to the lariat keeper on the pommel”) bore or baffle the reader unfamiliar with horse-breaking, shotgun- or howitzer-loading, elk-butchering, and the like. Some images are predictable, like honest-homely Annie’s “emerald eyes.” (In another first novel I read recently, the heroine’s eyes were “topaz” and her caddish lover’s “turquoise.” Let’s herewith ban forever all ocular gemstones.) And the italicized passages are so awkwardly interpolated as to seem merely undigested, whereas similar anecdotes and memories are worked in naturally elsewhere.

On the whole, however, the prose in “The Blind Corral” is clean and vivid, and the images of ranching life ring true: “It was that one thing, the cow down or the stillborn calf, that put you behind on an already tight schedule, when, if you were calving hard, you threw a canvas over the hay bunk in the barn and slept in your bloody coveralls. . . . And that went on, seven days a week, until the weather broke or you did.” So do the images of encroachment on that life: “As I drove through East Helena, a furnace crew from the smelter poured a pot of molten dross over the side of the slag heap. They stood against the skyline on their metallic mountain like ancient defenders of an ugly hilltop fort. . . .” In such writing Ralph Beer, himself a Montana rancher, transcends the romantic conventions surrounding man on the frontier. Through Jackson’s hard choices, he illuminates the demands of life in a land he plainly knows and loves. And thanks to the patient authenticity of his depiction, readers can come to know and even love it as well.