THE COWBOY & THE CHEERLEADER

In 1957 at Fern High School in Provo, Utah, Elaine Bybee is a cheerleader for the school’s lackluster football team. Even as a teen, she’s independent-minded when it comes to romance: “Elaine would never go with just one person. Once you settle down, that’s it.” Even decades later in the story she says, “It’s silly believing there is only one person for you.” Readers soon meet Elaine’s fellow cheerleader Mona Lynn Moss and her too-perfect boyfriend, Phil Smith, as well as Andy Bond, a good-natured rancher’s son from the southern part of the state who plays trombone in the school’s band. “He had good teeth,” Elaine notices, when she first meets Andy. “They looked naturally straight, not the type lined up with braces.” Andy later describes himself as coming from a family of “congenital optimists,” and soon he and Elaine are spending time together and growing closer. But despite their growing intimacy, time and circumstance pull them apart; Andy later settles down on his ranch with a cowgirl wife, and Elaine moves to New York City, where she tries hard to shed her small-town ways (“Boy, had she ever changed,” notes the third-person narration at one point). Decades pass, and unlike many novelists, Redd handles the passage of large stretches of time with smooth confidence. Andy gets divorced, Elaine’s longtime relationship with a man named Michael Shaughnessy dwindles to nothing, and in a series of events that feel only slightly contrived, Redd brings her two soul mates back together again. Over the course of the novel, Redd’s narrative voice is often disarmingly evocative: “Didn’t wobble at all,” she describes a football in flight, “a fine thing to see, that pointed ball flowing through the night, shaped to fit in hands, or to be hugged to a chest.” She also effectively shows how her female characters make compromises over time, which is perhaps the novel’s strongest element.

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