This thrilling book is a full-frontal attack on the senses

FICTION
Crux
Gabriel Tallent
Fig Tree, $34.99

What initially drew me to Gabriel Tallent’s Crux, the follow-up to his spectacularly successful first novel, My Absolute Darling, was that it was set in Joshua Tree National Park, in California, where I’d been on my way from Sedona to Paso Robles on a trip in 2024. It was one of the most arid, haunting and intriguing landscapes I’d ever seen, and I spent hours gazing at the iconic granite boulder piles. In Tallent’s complex and multi-layered second novel, the landscape is as much of a character as any of the somewhat troubled and eccentric folk that make up this colourful novel.

Crux starts as it means to go on, with a full-frontal attack on the senses as we get to know the two Southern Californian adolescents that are the beating heart of the book – Tamma, the shiteatingest girl you ever saw, and Dan, cerebral and calmer, but no less ambitious to be a climber.

Catapulted into a world of climbing vernacular, my heart was in my mouth from the first moment when Tamma and Dan, platonic soulmates, are trying to “send” – read achieve – the (fictional) massive V4-graded Fingerbang Princess. Despite no family support, no proper gear – which has an inevitable consequence – and no money, the pair are determined to make it in the world of pro-climbing.

In a sense, the book itself is similar to a “trad climb” – a form of free-climbing where climbers insert temporary gear into rock faces. As a reader, there are plenty of times when any security about what might happen next completely disappears, and we’re left scrambling, hanging in midair, searching for the next foothold.

Crux and My Absolute Darling share a young female protagonist at the core. In Tallent’s first novel, the 14-year-old Turtle Alveston is surviving life with her abusive father in the woods of the Mendocino coast. There’s one scene, involving a knife between her legs and push-ups, which is barely readable. In Crux it’s Tamma – queer, loud and an unattractive misfit (in her own eyes at least), from a dirt-poor family with a history of neglect, addiction and abuse, who takes centre stage for most of the book. Tamma’s desperate ambition to become a famous climber – to literally haul herself out of where she’s come from – is constantly thwarted by the trials life keeps throwing her way.

Dan, a stabilising influence for his risk-taking friend, also has a difficult life. His mother was the teenage writer of a one-hit wonder book, back when she was also best friends with Tamma’s mother. Now the friends are estranged, and Dan’s mother is a permanent semi-invalid with writer’s block, dedicated to two things in her life – staying sick, and getting her son into university. Dan’s father, a carpenter, has also become collateral damage for his wife. In this strained atmosphere, and torn between his desire to become a climber and a famous writer, Dan vacillates, until circumstances force him to make a choice.

These days, Tallent lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife and three children, in part because of its proximity to top-tier climbs. There are echoes of some of Tallent’s own experiences in the book – his Instagram is full of climbing photos; he grew up with two mothers, the prolific writer Elizabeth Tallent and her wife, Gloria Rogers; his father is a carpenter and Harriet, his wife, a nurse, and fellow climber. As a child, Tallent’s passions were books, adventure stories and the natural world; all these influences seem to have fed into the adage of write about what you know, with an extra layer of Tallent’s ongoing interest in the complexities of trauma and survival.

The word “crux”, from the Latin word meaning cross, or stake, means of course, the most important point at issue. In rock climbing it’s not dissimilar, defined as the hardest moves in a route, which in turn have the largest bearing on the climb’s overall grade. Tallent pulls together disparate cruxes in the stories of Tamma and Dan, as they suffer from the fragility of their family lives, face the price of their mutual desire to be free of responsibility, and accept the challenges of growing up – and in their cases, staying alive.

There’s nothing soft about this book, including the inventive, persistent and occasionally disturbing cursing, the descriptions of addiction, abuse and extreme hospitalisations.This is a book of extremes – extreme climbs, extreme ambition, extreme ego, extreme courage, and extreme disappointments, all swirling around in the otherworldly landscape of Joshua Tree and its environs. I wondered, at one point, if the extremes of everything were disturbing to me, but in the end I felt this was part of Tallent’s crux; to achieve a clean ascent via the most difficult route possible, with a storyline that is as compelling as it is masterful.

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