A Desert of Pure Feeling: A novel [Hardcover]

Judith Freeman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 23, 1996

From the writer whose voice Carolyn See has characterized as one of the strangest, most distinguished in American fiction writing today ("There is really nothing to compare her with, except, maybe, the austere beauty of a Japanese rock garden"), here is a richly dramatic novel about a woman struggling to make peace with herself as a mother, a lover, an artist, and a friend.

Lucy Patterson has just encountered her past in the person of a man whom she has not seen for twenty-five years. Dr. Carlos Cabrera saved the life of her infant son, and it was her love for him that compelled her to end her marriage -- the first moment in an arc of emotional turbulence and upheaval that has since defined her existence. Her past having caught up with her, Lucy has come to an isolated motel in the desert outside Las Vegas to write out her life, reexamine it, and, she hopes, find its calm center. It's a journey she is determined to make alone, but in the next room is a young woman -- a single mother, stripper, and prostitute panicked about her own life -- whom Lucy finds she cannot, and finally does not want to, ignore. A fiercely odd pair, they nonetheless become indispensable to each other in navigating the emotional terrain of their past and in finding, separately and together, clear paths into the future.

A Desert of Pure Feeling is the finest work we have yet seen from a writer whose gifts, at once lyrical and tough-minded, become vividly apparent in this penetrating and compelling story.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist Lucy Patterson, the 45-year-old narrator, tells us that once she wanted to write a huge historical narrative but that "the harder I tried to focus on my grand themes... the more personal were the events, the smaller the ideas, that overtook my imagination." It's an apt description of Freeman's effort here. The novel moves between the present, in which Lucy tells her story from the Las Vegas motel to which she has retreated in the wake of a traumatic disaster, and Lucy's past, mostly as it concerns Dr. Carlos Cabrera, a Guatemalan doctor who saved the life of Lucy's young son and with whom Lucy had a formative affair. When Carlos shows up, after all these years, aboard a cruise ship on which Lucy is traveling, they rekindle their affair. The disaster strikes after another passenger forces from Carlos a revelation about his youth in Nazi Germany. This in turn forces from Freeman some awkward and dramatically flat exposition about the tricky nature of moral judgment. Back in Vegas, Lucy is drawn closer?emotionally and erotically?to Joycelle, a vulnerable hooker and stripper. Freeman (Set for Life; Chinchilla Farm) would have done better to confine herself to a deeper juxtaposition of Lucy's two loves?the refined, sophisticated older Carlos and the vulgar, semiliterate younger Joycelle. Lucy's story is a moving, deliberate meditation on love that is at its best when simply mapping the interior lives of its characters. It falters when Freeman throws in Nazis, Mormons and Guatemalan terrorism, elements that provide a false, often melodramatic sense of scope to what is, in the end, a very intimate novel.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

When Lucy Patterson, a middle-aged, long-divorced fiction writer, was invited to fill in as writer-in-residence on a luxury cruise to Europe, she never expected to meet up with her former lover, Dr. Carlos Cabrera. Carlos was the surgeon who, many years earlier, had operated on the malformed heart of Lucy's young son and saved his life. Their affair led her to end her marriage and enter a new path in life. Now Lucy is trying to put things in perspective by writing about their encounter while holed up in a seedy Las Vegas motel, where she has befriended a surly young AIDS-infected prostitute in the neighboring room. Jumping between various time frames, the novel lurches somewhat breathlessly through revelations of the dark secrets of the past to a mildly happy, unexpected ending. A good addition to most libraries from the author of The Chinchilla Farm (LJ 6/15/89).?Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 274 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (April 23, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679432906
• ISBN-13: 978-0679432906
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,803,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A love story that explores the realities of love and loss., November 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Desert of Pure Feeling (Paperback)

In A Desert of Pure Feeling, Judith Freeman's character, Lucy, explores the worlds of being a mother, lover, and companion in the west. Freeman delves into the mind of Lucy, a now middle-aged woman, who has played all these roles and is striving to move on with her life while struggling to make sense of a tragic past. Freeman intermingles the past with the present, allowing the reader to fully understand what makes Lucy the woman she is. As a mother Lucy Patterson struggles with a sick infant son with a heart defect. After her son's death in Guatemala (he is a Mormon missionary who disappears after the bombing of the home of the missionaries) she is plagued by the past of being an unstable mother since giving birth to him at the young age of 19. She battles with the regret of being a self centered mother unable to focus time on her son. It was not until after he was gone that she realized how badly he needed it. Lucy's voyage through her past love life begins when she leaves her home on an Idaho ranch as a fiction writer to be the guest writer on an all expense paid trip on the Oceanus, an ocean liner aimed for shores of England. The Oceanus is the beginning of Lucy's trek back in time with the reunion of her love, Dr. Carlos Cabrera. Carlos is a well known surgeon who operated on Lucy's two-year-old son years earlier. Soon after the operation the two become lovers despite the gab in age. Their love for each other is strong, but their dedication to their separate families proves to be stronger. The lovers quickly lose contact with each other, but will never escape each other's thoughts. Their reunion aboard the Oceanus gives them a new start together. After twenty years it appears nothing has changed between them, and their love for each other proves to be as strong as ever, as they console each other after their losses: the disappearance of her son and the death of Carlos' wife. The affair again comes to a halt when Carlos' dark past of being a member of Hitler's Youth during the war comes out. Unable to face his past Carlos flings himself over the edge of the ocean liner to his death, leaving Lucy once again alone. Lucy flees to Las Vegas to the Tally Ho Inn in an attempt to make sense of her life and begin writing once again. Here Lucy meets Joycelle, a young hooker who has just discovered that she is HIV-positive and soon becomes Lucy's companion. Lucy forms a close bond with Joycelle and becomes her primary caretaker after her disease sets in. In a seeming attempt to make up for the lost time with her son, Lucy retreats to her Idaho ranch with Joycelle and spends Joycelle's last days together in the solitude of the west. Freeman's writing is surprisingly refreshing. It allows the readers to become the female character and play out her fantasies alongside her. Her description of Lucy's surroundings becomes tangible and real for the readers and lets them become emotionally attached to Lucy's lost son, Carlos, and Joycelle. By forming these attachments to the characters the readers can come to a deeper understanding of how Lucy has become the mature woman she is through dealing with a hard past and allowing herself to look toward what appears to be a hard future with the lose on another love, Joycelle. Freeman leaves Lucy as the last survivor in her world suggesting that she has conquered the harshness of life by moving on after the loss of the people who have made her who she is: a mother, lover, and companion.

4.0 out of 5 stars A contemporary love story portraying a western woman, November 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Desert of Pure Feeling (Paperback)

Judith Freeman's "A Desert of Pure Feeling" is a contemporary love story that portrays a western woman with depth and dimension in her most intimate roles--as a daughter, wife, mother, friend, and lover. This compelling novel looks at the ways one extraordinary woman faces the task of gathering the evidence of the past into a meaningful awareness of the present. With honesty and courage, this woman searches her relationships and comes to know the secrets of her own heart. This is a western story, with a ranch in Idaho, the desert spaces of Utah, and the lure of Las Vegas. But the geography is not limited to the west. The sotry's primary setting is Las Vegas, in a motel called the Tally Ho, where Lucy, the main character and a writer, is speaking at a conference. Las Vegas was a familiar place to Lucy not only throughout her childhood vacations traveling through this city but because it was originally settled by her people and is symbolic to her of her Mormon upbringing. Lucy has traveled to Las Vegas from her home on an isolated ranch in the mountains of Idaho. At this conference she agrees to travel across the Atlantic on a ship in exchange for giving a reading during the voyage. "What I could not have known was how this decision would lead me back along the path of my own life, how it would open up old wounds and lay them bare and create new ones I hadn't expected" (13). On board she is shocked when she encounters Dr. Carlos Cabrera, the surgeon who many years ago had saved her son's life, the man to whom she had given her heart, and with whom she had hoped to share her life. The shipboard journey takes Lucy across the Atlantic Ocean and to London, filling in the crucial gaps in her relationship with Cabrera, helping her to understand the forces that have shaped this man. The ship encounters a violent storm at sea, and the motion is reflected in dangerous waves of another form. Traveling on to Cornwall, Lucy wrestles the demons from her past that threaten her hold on life. This is not a one-time reckoning, but as Lucy discovers, a process requiring both a yielding and a resistance. Judith Freeman has given us a novel that speaks to the challenge women face today in coming to terms with their own identities as revealed in their most intimate relationships. The author looks unflinchingly at the contradictions and complexity of human relationships as the character faces her role as a mother, a wife, a lover, a writer, and a human being struggling with loss. Once Lucy made choices that protected her heart; now life offers her the chance to risk loving with all her heart. To embrace love is to embrace loss, and Freeman traces Lucy's path to self-knowledge with strokes that resonate with the human yearning for meaning within ourselves and with others.

4.0 out of 5 stars Despite controversial topics, this book is worth while., April 20, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: A Desert of Pure Feeling: A novel (Hardcover)

Morgan Braucht ENG 272 April 7, 1998 "A Desert of Pure Feeling: The Story of People's pasts" With her book, A Desert of Pure Feeling, Judith Freeman invites us to read a story of people who are running away from the past. One thing that you are forced to think about while reading this book is that to people who don't know their pasts these appear to be average, everyday human beings like you and me. It's not until you hear their stories that you can differentiate their lifestyles from that of the average person. Personally, I didn't agree with some of the issues that Freeman dealt with (i.e. adultery, homosexuality, etc.), but it does help the reader realize that every person in the world has their own story to tell and their own way of telling it. Las Vegas, "in the heart of the Mojave", as the author puts it, is the central setting for most of the story. Lucy, the person telling the story, is drawn to Las Vegas because of beautiful childhood memories and the fact that Las Vegas was settled by "her people". Another setting is a cruise boat where Lucy is doing a literary reading of one of her works. Here she is re-introduced to Dr. Carlos Cabrera who saved the life of her son and whom she had an affair with. This take us to Minnesota where we revisit Justin, Lucy's son, and his fight for life and the introduction of Dr. Cabrera into Lucy's life. Like the classic Westerns depicted by John Wayne or Louis L'Amour, A Desert of Pure Feeling contains many themes parallel to that of the frontier. Religion is a major part of Western America and it fills a role in this story as well. Although her father used to be the bishop of the local church, Lucy had "stopped believing in religion years ago". "Why should I believe if he doesn't", was Lucy's opinion on religion after she noticed a bit of hypocrisy on her father's part. Where as religion is usually seen as a vital part of the West, Lucy shows that one can live without it. Just like the hero that saves the day in a cowboy movie, Carlos fills the role of the strong, western male stereotype. "He was tall and rather thin and had aristocratic features - an aquiline nose and high cheekbones and a clear, straight brow." This, in similar words, is what the typical hero is pictured as. Carlos rescues Lucy from two things: her marriage and the immediate death of her young son. As it turns out, Justin brought Carlos and Lucy together not by just needing surgery, but Justin is eventually killed in Guatemala. Guatemala happens to be Carlos's native land. There are also quite a few examples of symbolism in this story. However, there were two examples that really caught my attention. Placing part of the story on a ship was very crucial. Here everyone aboard was forced to deal with the past. Since they were surrounded by nothing but water, no one could run from the past. Also, the wave that hits the boat simulates Mr. Himmelfarb showing up and bringing the past to the forefront. As stated earlier, Judith Freeman brings up many very controversial subjects. While I wasn't personally offended by any of this, it is possible for the reader to become uncomfortable reading such material. I definitely think that there is a little too much detail in some situations and this is the major drawback of the book. This book probably shouldn't be recommended to anyone that's not mature enough to handle the content. Other than that I thought the book was enjoyable reading.