Meet old Texas’ Don Quixote

ALTHOUGH 700 pages seems awfully long for a novel with an obscure title by a relatively unknown author of four works of well-received fiction, by the time you finish reading “Tehano,” you will be wondering why it was so short.

Set in Texas before, during and after the Civil War -- although by no means limited to that geography -- this massive novel was defiantly conceived, as author Allen Wier states in the prologue:

“Most folks are hooked on the here and now. This yarn takes a reader to the there and then: a some-time-ago place on the Southwestern Frontier where Gideon Jones and more than a handful of others lived out their last years. Some even managed a tolerable death. An interval of more than a century may have dimmed the glow of their earthly lives, but time’s passage hasn’t erased memory’s portraiture of those here recalled, though their earthly bodies have long departed.”

To place the novel so as to better enjoy it: Remember Cervantes’ sad knight riding his broken-down nag, Rocinante? Or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews? How about Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or, a little more obscurely, Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker?

Having focused a little on the picaresque, the episodic tale of adventure, you are ready for Gideon Jones, a Baltimore orphan who was given his last name by a doctor tending him. “Jones.... Rhymes with bones.”

It seems that Gideon has a way with the dying -- there were many of them in the orphanage. “Perhaps there was reason mixed in that rhyme, some sign of his life to come and of his profession not as journalist or correspondent but as an undertaker of men’s bones.”

With this review measuring only about one word per page of “Tehano” (from the Spanish tejano for a Texan of Mexican descent), the reader needs to know essential and, one hopes, enticing information, starting with the fact that he or she will be placed in the capable hands of Gideon, the wandering freelance undertaker, gun runner and transporter of human bones searching for a resting place.

Gideon is classically educated in a hit-and-miss fashion -- he is a faithful reader of the concluding volume (VIS-ZWI) of the 1842 edition of the “Encyclopedia Americana” -- and is the diligent chronicler, in a large, bound ledger, of his own heartbreaking adventures and those of a vast array of characters whose lives are braided into the rope of his life.

Not a parody, not a satire (since it will not close on Saturday night), “Tehano” succeeds because Wier has a grand vision rooted in a jeweler’s particularity that encompasses both the tragic and the comic.

This broadness of vision sustains Wier’s daring imagination, which allows us to fully inhabit the disparate lives of his characters, all of whom are seeking the unarticlutated promise summed up in the phrase “Gone to Texas,” a particular version of the more famous “Go west, young man.”

There is Rudolph Hermann, a newly arrived German immigrant who becomes a killer in order to get the stake so he can seek his fortune. We catch him in just one of the book’s many gruesome but necessary acts of violence: “Rudolph found a handkerchief in the man’s breast pocket and forced it down the man’s throat. His wiry beard prickled Rudolph’s palm.”

Later, Rudolph will find the abandoned twin son of a great Comanche warrior who, like Moses, had been set adrift in a basket by his fearful mother, and this boy will cross through the lives of Gideon and his true yet lost love, an Indiana farm girl named Dorsey Murphy.

There is the escaped slave Knobby Cotton, running from his masters and slave-killing militias and clad only in mud and dried leaves, whose life will also intersect Gideon’s during the terrible, unrelenting war waged by Tejano and Comanche.

And there are the Northern Wesley twins, who end up on opposing sides in the Civil War; one of their friends now carries the shot-away arm of his friend in a long leather pouch.

The complexity of the American story is made wonderfully accessible by Wier, who has a delicious empathy for his characters -- they are human beings before they are Comanche, slave, Mexican, man or woman.

The final words should be Wier’s: “Memories of uncivilized years and frontier places swirled like dust devils on the wide plain. Gideon let the heavy volume fall open in his hands. The wind riffled page after page of knowledge and meanings outdated or forgotten. Words fluttered and rattled like small, dark birds he was releasing into the wide sky, signals he was sending from a faraway time.”

But in the spirit of “Tehano,” I was thinking: Am I that reader of “Don Quixote” in 1605, hoping it will not be 10 years before the second part of this story appears?

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Thomas McGonigle is the author of “Going to Patchogue” and “The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov.”