Sand in the Minimalist Paint : RED LINE <i> by Charles Bowden (W. W. Norton: $16.95; 202 pp.) </i>

Although it has been by far the more celebrated and certainly the most influential school of American writing during the last 15 years (the academic image seems peculiarly appropriate to the first movement in American letters to have been formed almost entirely in university writing programs), minimalism has had by no means so overbearing an effect on other American writing as many people now suppose.

In the West, particularly, a far grittier, resolutely undomesticated style exemplified by Thomas Sanchez, by Jim Harrison, and, though he is less well known, by Charles Bowden, has provided a happy reminder to readers bored by minimalism’s Pointillist timidities that there are writers at work today who insist on using wilder colors in their palette and who even have been known to mix a little sand in with the paint.

“Red Line” is a fine book, exhibiting both the refreshing strengths as well as the undoubted weaknesses of this approach. It is Bowden’s fifth, a hybrid of personal memoir, a historical evocation of 1849 and of the settling of the Southwest, a journalistic hunt along the Arizona-Sonora border for a drug dealer named Nacho whose career and death become an obsession for Bowden, and a harsh and moving nature chronicle.

The mixture sounds unwieldy, but in fact Bowden moves so skillfully among his various narratives that the reader is in danger of forgetting how great his accomplishment is in keeping them all going so persuasively. Indeed, one of the many pleasurable surprises of reading “Red Line” is seeing how much Bowden manages to cram into a book of only 202 pages.

Bowden’s America is an unremittingly harsh place. Although streaks of light from the American Dream are still visible, the book unfolds in a bleak country in which all promises have been betrayed and all certainties lost, and whose spiritual condition is that of homelessness. For Bowden, there is nothing to do but keep moving.

The book begins with him emerging on the Mexican side of the border after a 200-mile trek and ends with a dream of flight. Bowden is sitting in a grand hotel bar, “a place,” as he puts it, “paneled with wood, dimly lit for fantasy,” and imagines himself climbing then and there into a truck, and then crashing it through the walls of the bar, pedal to the metal, into the night.

It is, in fact, the only way Bowden could have ended his book. Having conjured up a picture of the Southwest as an unforgiving realm of despoiled nature and bestial humanity, he hardly could have offered any other consolation except solitude and motion. It is a quintessentially American vision, harking back to the stark words of that earlier observer of the American Southwest, D. H. Lawrence, who wrote in his “Studies in Classic American Literature” that the paradigmatic American hero was “hard, isolate, and a killer.”

At its best, “Red Line” can read like an original synthesis of Peter Matthiessen and William Burroughs. The book is particularly strong when Bowden is dealing with the Mexican characters. Indeed, rarely has the meeting of north and south along the American-Mexican frontier been described so well or so ruthlessly.

Bowden’s description of the physical reality of the border, which soon becomes a moral and historical evocation as well, is perfectly judged. “We hit the freeway,” he writes in one typical passage, “Interstate 8, and follow along. The culverts under the big road are rich with artefacts: hundreds of human footprints heading north, big empty cups of 7-11’s Super Big Gulp. Here and there erupt the tire tracks of the Border Patrol, then the machine stops, and huge American footprints briefly join the legion of feet walking into El Norte . The American impressions stand for the rules, black coffee, and endless forms. The Mexicans’ stand for the appetites.”

When Bowden abandons the border, the drug trade in the Chicano colonias of Arizona and California, and his historical and ecological evocations, however, his bleakness often seems less like an earned pessimism about the human condition and more like self-indulgence.

The acknowledgement Bowden appends to a friend called Julian Hayden who “never asked what I was doing, or stopped pouring shots of mescal” not only reeks of Hemingwayesque sentimental machismo but frequently finds its mawkish echo in the text of “Red Line” itself. The book is filled with sentences like “I am at ease. With the night,” and “I am always leaving and yet I have no home. No one does any more,” that seem to contain far less than the author imagines, embodying self-absorption more convincingly than genuine alienation.

Nowhere in the book does Bowden ever really explain why he is so impatient, or has such a desperate inability to stay with a woman or such a desperate need for solitude. Only with this information could the reader possibly sympathize with the persona Bowden presents, and yet he is largely content to simply stipulate it.

After all, pessimism is hardly a virtue in and of itself. It needs a grounding in reality, one that Bowden provides when he is writing about the world of the border but balks at when he is talking about his own state of mind. For all their limitations, this is not a shortcut any of the minimalists would dream of taking. Indeed, at his weakest, Bowden stops writing altogether, sometimes at the critical moment, as when he ends a brilliant set-piece evocation of small-town America with a long quote from the rock ‘n’ roll anthem, “Runaway.” Presumably this juxtaposition is meant to underscore the fact that the need for flight is ingrained in the American psyche. The effect, however, is one of authorial lassitude. No matter how great Del Shannon’s song was, or what it summed up, it should not be called upon to do the author’s work for him.

It also should be stated that the America that Bowden describes with such eloquent despair is not in fact such an empty or hopeless place to the illegal immigrants whose movement north he describes with such intelligence and sympathy. Nor is the Southwest just an empty quarter of despoliated lands and empty hearts: It is the place where the jobs are; it is the place where millions of people lead lives of ordinary passion and ordinary unhappiness. The American Dream may no longer be pretty--if, indeed, it ever was--but it has plenty of juice left in it, and no representation of our reality is complete without acknowledging those hard facts as well.

“Red Line” is a brave and interesting book, but one comes away from it thinking that it is all very well to run the tachometer up to the limit from time to time, but the experiment does not tell one very much about how most cars are actually driven.