James Wade’s Depression-era road novel, Narrow the Road, features three adolescents: William, “a gawky, spindle-shanked creature,” his friend, Ollie, and Lena, a girl running from a con artist’s medicine show. These kids, fully characterized and full of life, will stick with readers the way they’re still living with me.
Yes, it’s a coming-of-age story. And much more—a true pilgrims’ progress.
The fleeing adolescents face great stress—an understatement—plowing through swamps and sin, sometimes with shiftless ne’er do wells. They’re full of grit—even when terrified—and goodwill, too, when occasions demand.
Their steadfast camaraderie and gosh-darn goodness earn readers’ respect and trust on every page. Their survival odds seem terrifyingly long.
The journey and the characters prove satisfyingly rich with scenes alive with sensory details. The novel is equal parts emotion and action, easily sweeping readers along on their remarkable, heartbreaking quest.
Historical fiction forces our collective memory to remember circumstances, events, and people who faced woes that, to us today, may be forgotten or unbelievable. But we need to remember. These Depression woes, for instance, may seem unimaginable, yet I grew up listening to first-person stories of what we today might call “food insecurity.” There were “slim pickings,” foodwise, is what my grandparents said.
My parents, uncles, and aunts who lived the Depression never forgot the hunger.
The novel’s prologue introduces the young William Carter, “a young person in a dying land. A dying time. War and rumors of war.” In Shawnee Prairie, Texas, William must tend his dying mother, trying to ease her pain with the only medicine available—morphine. She refuses the drug, which shows us how sick she really is.
Later that day, the local banker visits, and asks young William if he knows the word foreclosure. This dialogue reveals so much: the circumstance—the reference to family finances, the banker’s presumptions about the family, and about William’s ignorance.
Of course, William knows, and fears, that word.
Not only is his mother dying, but the family cotton crop is failing. Ultimately, William and best friend Ollie, son of a mortician, take to the road. They’ve got to locate William’s father and bring him home. The father has joined some 25,000 World War I veterans in the “bonus army” in Washington, D.C. The encamped soldiers aim to collect their World War I service pay.
Wade includes several chilling chapters from the elder Carter’s point of view, some of which place us in those foreign mustard-gas battles. These brief episodes enlarge and deepen the story as father and son, separately, seek necessary satisfaction: William and his mother need his father; his father needs his veterans’ service pay to save farm and family.
On the road, these two boys take in the runaway girl, Lena. They admire her prowess with a pistol. These young pilgrims travel cotton fields, navigate sheep and goat herds, walk dry riverbeds and negotiate floodwaters. They sometimes join streams of tattered and barefoot migrants who are also desperate for survival. Wagons. Animals. One night William sees a caravan on the highway: “lanterns passing along in the dark, like souls adrift.”
Ultimately the boys and Lena must face the dreaded Big Thicket —the legendary parcel of untamed land, drenched in humidity and lord knows what else. Readers’ palms will sweat, praying for the kids’ survival, rooting for these kids, who are desperate for something good to happen, until the last page.
Wade’s prose is vivid and specific, captivating readers through fully-realized scenes.
And there’s love in this big, big novel, too. And an intelligent ape.
James Wade
James Wade lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country with his wife and daughter. He is the author of “Beasts of the Earth,” a winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Best Contemporary Novel, “River, Sing Out” and the critically-acclaimed debut novel “All Things Left Wild,” a winner of the prestigious 2021 MPIBA Reading the West Award for Debut Fiction, and a recipient of the 2021 Spur Award for Best Historical Novel from the Western Writers of America.
Leave a Reply