Anyone who has wondered about the value of print-on-demand books would do well to read Theresa Donovan Brown's eye-opening novel, Summitville (iUniverse.com, 2001, $15.95). It will not only tell you more than you probably want to know about irresponsible mining, but also reassure you that worthwhile literature is being produced outside mainstream publishing. Print-on-demand books, which can be ordered on the Internet from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com, bypass single-mindedly commercial publishing houses yet produce highly readable copy in book format. They represent an intermediary step between paper books as we have known them and electronic books, to be read or downloaded from a computer.
A quirk of politics--President George W. Bush's controversial choice for secretary of the interior--makes the book especially timely: the real environmental disaster on which the novel is based occurred on Gale Norton's watch as attorney general of Colorado. In the early '90s, cyanide solutions used to extract gold from the Summitville open-pit mine caused severe contamination when they leaked into local waterways. Groups trying to prevent Norton's confirmation in January cited the fact that she had failed to prosecute the responsible parties.
This said, Summitville can stand on its own as an engrossing piece of environmental literature. Like Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow (both made into movies), Summitville dramatizes the devastation caused by individuals whose sole aim is to amass wealth, regardless of the cost to the ecosystem. In Brown's fiction, the chief villain is Rob Sharpe, a charismatic mine owner determined to extract gold from an abandoned site and anxious to cover up the fact that the poisonous brew of cyanide and heavy metals used in the mining process is spilling into the local waters.
His antagonist, Colleen Fitzgerald, is at first no match for the charming, ruthless Sharpe. A gold-stock analyst for a bank that is underwriting the Summitville project, the young woman has a history of self-destructive love affairs and drug use. She is small in stature, subject to attacks of hypoglycemia and vulnerable to Sharpe's larger-than-life seductive powers. Still, she possesses a moral strength that sustains her in the conflict between his monomaniacal greed and her concern for the well-being of the greater Summitville community.
Called to the Colorado mine as a replacement for a beloved colleague who recently died there under suspicious circumstances, Fitzgerald follows the path of countless literary heroes and heroines driven to unravel a mystery. Ostensibly she is there to determine firsthand whether her home company in San Francisco should continue to back the mine. What Fitzgerald has not anticipated is her encounter with local activists gathering evidence to document the operation's toxic effects.
The author deftly gives voice to these dedicated people without sacrificing their idiosyncrasies. Anna, a biogeochemist, is "almost a leprechaun, even shorter than Colleen." Victor, a journalist, plays "a revenue-shifting game" whereby he manages to bill the town to pay his parking tickets. Characters like these, as well as representative mine workers, farmers, ranchers, environmentalists and paramilitarists (some white, some Hispanic or Native American), bespeak the surprising complexity of a Western small town, whose inhabitants have wildly conflicting interests and opinions.
But the most significant character in this novel is the environment itself. The mountains, the rivers, the forests, the farmlands and the animals are all threatened by the workings of the mine. Author Brown, '76, a former bond trader who spent time at Summitville doing background research for the book, is at her best when she evokes the living presence of an endangered world. For example, in the forest Colleen sees from a distance "five-foot antlers growing out of the head of an enormous creature. . . . Snowflakes stuck to his shaggy hide." They are downwind of the moose and Colleen can smell him "like a horse but gamier." Or, driving on the road that parallels the river, she observes: "Along the bank, black silhouettes of defoliated cottonwoods pierced the fog and inveighed against the universal weather. The river, the cradle of life, mover, rock eater, went by in blackness beneath their roots."
Or, from the vantage of a small plane flying over the mountains, Colleen is awed by "the deep variegated greens of spruce forest" at the lower elevations and the "bare-rock ruggedness" of a peak. Yet this aerial view of the 20-million-year-old formation is not uniformly majestic. In one indentation of the range, "where earth movers had scraped clean the flesh-colored superficial clay around it, the Summitville Mine gaped like Munch's Shriek."
Edvard Munch's The Shriek, painted a hundred years ago in Norway, is an apt correlative for the sense of foreboding this novel conveys. Though Summitville is fiction, its warning must be taken seriously. In the best tradition of Western writers (think of Stanford's own Wallace Stegner), Brown makes us look at the landscape with heightened awareness and strengthens our resolve to protect it.
Marilyn Yalom, a senior scholar at Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender, wrote A History of the Breast (Knopf, 1997) and A History of the Wife (HarperCollins, 2001).
