Tehano: A Novel [Hardcover]

Allen Wier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2006

"Allen Wier has imagined a way to express an epic vision of the American experiment at its crossroads. From the antebellum era, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wier's sizable cast of characters-African American freedmen and slaves, Native American warriors and their women, Confederate and Union veterans, immigrants, and citizens high and low-pitch up in Comanche territory in Texas, enacting their destinies. Wier has breathed new life into representative American men and women in a style alive with realism, soaring with lyricism, and vibrant with humor. His understanding of the Native American and the African American experience is stunningly uncanny."-David Madden

"An extraordinary accomplishment: a novel of Tolstoyan scope. Here is the palpable savage young country itself, and its people with all their loves, fears, passions, hopes, dreams, and sufferings-human souls searingly brought forth from the swirl of history. It is a great work of fictive Art, and to my mind perhaps the finest achievement of my generation, no less."-Richard Bausch

With vivid and authentic detail and a storm of narrative power, Allen Wier's Tehano brings together historical and imagined events, giving readers a sense of the final years of the nineteenth century-a time both brutal and majestic-that spawned our present time. The disparate narrative skeins are collected through the efforts of Gideon Jones, a westering picaro who sets down his adventures and those of the people whose path his crosses.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With 17 major characters and countless minor ones, Wier's latest (after 1989's A Place for Outlaws) is a complex story of Texas from 1842 to 1866, replete with cowboys, Indians, soldiers, settlers, liars, thieves, slaves, scoundrels and a hapless frontier mortician. Gideon Jones is an itinerant undertaker, aspiring journalist and optimistic lightning rod salesman who heads to Texas for adventure. He writes in his journal about the people he meets, creating a convoluted series of crisscrossing plots: one set of white twin boys fight on opposite sides in the Civil War; another pair of Comanche Indian twin boys discover their relationship too late to save one another. There's also Knobby, an escaped slave searching for his wife and son who have been captured by Indians; Portis "Eye" Goar, a pragmatic and murderous cowboy; Orten Trainer, a one-armed con artist who assumes someone else's identity; and a group of unlucky sodbusters. Through Civil War battles, Indian wars and gunfights, the characters will meet: some will die, others will be traumatized and a few will reach old age relatively intact. Readers may wish that Weir had scalped portions of his manuscript, as the narrative, though impressive in scope, is too sprawling and relies heavily on gruesome depictions of violence to sustain momentum. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

As sprawling as the mid-nineteenth-century Texas landscape in which it is set, this novel encompasses a cross spectrum of uniquely American characters and mores. African immigrant settlers, scalawags, and opportunists populate Wier's vivid reimagining of the rugged Texas frontier before, during, and after the Civil War. Though the intersecting plots are initially difficult to navigate, the author eventually interweaves them into an epic retelling of a pivotal juncture in American history. Never prettied up or romanticized, this rambling slice of Americana reflects all the passion, violence, and volatility of a country on the brink of self-realization. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Southern Methodist University Press (March 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870745069
• ISBN-13: 978-0870745065
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,637,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good history and even better literature, July 7, 2006

By 

L. Moyse (Baton Rouge, La.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Tehano: A Novel (Hardcover)

From the moment I began reading Allen Wier's TEHANO, I was struck by the sheer immensity of the research that went into this tale's telling. Wier is able to include historical, biblical and ethnographic scholarship that informs all levels of his narration, thus making for a rich reading experience, but none of this ever gets in the way, is never obtrusive.

There is a strong and sure realism at work here, but not the hyper-realism of some such as Robbe-Grillet, for example, and Wier never loses his perspective with it, whether he is giving the reader an overview from a hawk's vantage point, or a close-up
in miniature of two people in love, tribes in battle or any one of the many meetings, partings and diremptions which mark the fate of many characters in the book. Just as he handles the human condition with balance and insight and compassion, Wier also manages to keep the reader cognizant of larger forces at play, of the Civil War and slavery, of Westward expansion 'Manifest destiny' and, for many characters, an almost reflexive genocidal impulse.

TEHANO is written with a respect for story telling and a reverence for the West and I think Allen Wier's achievement here, beyond the book's scope and ambition, is a seamless melding of history and literature sewn together with such skill it is hard to find a flaw in the skein. The end of the book, which does as one reviewer suggested, come so soon, is never telegraphed and involves some genuinely masterful and intricate choreography that gives the narrative the shape of a river flowing from headwaters to mouth, expanding here, constricting there, coming finally to that place where it can no longer contain all the creatures in its wake.
There is great violence, great compassion and great humanity here, the work of a thoughtful writer who still believes in the virtues of strong-telling through strong narrative.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The ultimate summer read, June 22, 2006

By 

M. McDowell (Knoxville, Tennessee United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tehano: A Novel (Hardcover)

You need this book. As a reader and a bibliophile, I promise that you will not be disappointed.

Before you even begin to read, the heft of the book assures you of many happy hours. It is a satisfying size that promises days spent in the past. The tintype photos on the front provide realism and ask to be decoded. The colors of the jacket and cover are of the Old west's worn saddles and Victorian wallpaper, and the creamy pages and font hearken back to cowboy times when people read the long evenings away.

I taught myself to read when I was three and picked books thereafter for their size because I felt so bereft when my time with the characters was through. In seventh grade, I read all that Dickens had to offer and have searched since for that same feeling of being caught up with people and being surprised at every chapter with new connections and harrowing adventures for my favorites. This book took me back to those delicious afternoons when I had nothing to do but read and could stay with my new friends until the end, laughing, crying, and shaking with fright until they were safely home.

Although the tale is epic, the big plot moves in ever smaller spirals as the characters meet each other. There is an intimacy and a believable quality to the intersection of these disparate lives. It would be tempting for an author, in the grand sweep of such a plot to focus on events rather than flesh out the characters, but these characters are drawn with satisfying detail. Each chapter is written with the finely honed care of a short story where economy of words is necessary, yet the reader will know the people well after the first introduction of each. The minor characters are a delight and often provide humor and respite from the more intense action. They are as carefully crafted as the major characters and certainly as memorable. You will be able to see and hear these people long after you put the book down.

The intricacy of the plot is easily followed because of a character list with short descriptions, chapter headings and subheadings, and the connecting thread of Gideon the undertaker's journal. The theme of twin ship is threaded throughout as well as the idea of freedom, not just from slavery but from parental expectation, social convention, and personal demons from the past. The reader does not have to wait for the ending to view redemption. Small victories are sprinkled throughout. A particularly poignant chapter describes two escaped slaves, Knobby and Elizabeth, viewing the ocean for the first time. Never having left the plantation, they are baptized in the waves and healed by the salty water as they speak marriage vows to each other.

The large cast of characters provides favorite moments for each type of reader. You will find romance, battle, action, history, mystery, family drama, faith, fables, domestic fiction, slave narrative, and travelogue. The sensual detail used for even the minor events provide a sumptuous feast. The author has used stunning imagery with a gritty, photographic quality. A reader may often have a reading experience where he can picture a character and perhaps even hear their voice through skillful point of view, but in this book, you can even smell the sweat of labor or the cheap perfume of the whorehouse, and you can taste the salty bite of oysters as Knobby and Elizabeth eat seafood for the first time or savor the sweet treats that Gideon the undertaker loves even more than beer.

Without being preachy, the author takes the reader deep into the Native American culture to see that all peoples have more in common than we would like to admit. While the more violent aspects of Indian life are not sugarcoated, they are balanced with the powerful love that families have for one another and the impending sense of a way of life ending. The Indian perspective is balanced with that of the white settlers, and the reader sees that nobody was right in this conflict that led to senseless killing on both sides. A balanced portrayal of the rich and poor is also shown along with the struggle between con men and immigrants and believers and unbelievers. Characters on both sides of each issue are likeable and interesting. No stock villains are shown here.

While many characters make choices that would cause the reader to wince and there is much cruelty as one would expect when reading about the Old West accurately depicted, there is a hope and tenderness here as well. There are sinners who keep their word and saints who stray. The only disappointment about this book is that it ends too soon.

You have found the perfect summer read, but even at the first reading, Tehano is a book that you know you will be reading again and for years to come.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fully imagined world, September 18, 2006

By 

W. R. Smith (Evanston, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tehano: A Novel (Hardcover)

A wonderful read - an imagined world full of vividly realized characters, places, and stories. I say stories because there are four major story lines and several minor ones, all of which play out between Manhattan and Matamoros, Mexico in the latter part of the Civil War and the early postwar years. The characters include soldiers and ex-soldiers both Blue and Gray running from the war, native Americans under siege once the war no longer occupied the whites, slaves escaping their masters, and multitudes of Midwestern farmers, speculators, and freebooters of all kinds looking for a new start or a quick killing. This is multistranded historical fiction in the tradition of Annie Dillard, Larry McMurtry, and Charles Frazier: storytelling that pays close attention to landscapes and to the vernacular, everyday customs, and artifacts - in a word, the culture - of the people. The experience of reading TEHANO is like tuning a guitar, with the various story lines constituting the strings. When you put on new strings, you start out with a lot of slack, so you can wind the string several times around the tuning gear to make the string hold tight. As you twist the tuner and the wire pulls taut, you begin to hear a tone, a pitch, and the tighter you wind the wire, the clearer and more focused the tone. As you do this string after string, each one makes its own sound, but it's unclear for awhile how the individual sounds cohere. The last step is the final tuning, when you adjust the strings to each other, bringing each one into relationship with the others so that the ensemble creates a harmonious whole. The novel had that kind of effect on me, with the various "strings," after having been slowly tightened during the first 600 pages, finally becoming aligned and tuned together in the last 100 or so pages. At the end, I felt I was indeed holding a finely tuned instrument.