Cuervo Tales — Robert Roper

These tales take place in the mountains of northern California and recall a town--called Cuervo--that has figured as a renegade community since the first Mexican settlers wiped out ``a particularly passive'' tribe of Costanoan Indians. Cuervo has since then been home to bounty hunters, speculators, Mexican ``highwaymen,'' distillers, ``failed Stanford students'' in the 1950s, and backwoodsy survivors of excessive LSD experimentation. It was also home for a time to Abel Richards, who experienced the '60s there in all its many colors, in addition to a marriage that went awry. These 10 interlinked stories are Richards' recollections of an era now past, a time when a part of American society fancied they were reimagining their very beings, only to find years later, as Richards does, that there is no escaping one's original self. Cuervo Tales concludes with a correspondence between Richards and a son he unknowingly sired on a trip to Europe in the late '60s. Roper, whose last book, Trespassers , was extravagantly praised for its eccentric, California-style retelling of Lady Chatterley's Lover , is here on more trodden ground, and the characters--especially Abel Richards--verge on the tiresome. Still, for a certain generation, this book will fire many synapses long ago thought burned out. (July)