Sisters Rode-Ode

By Brad Lockwood

The "biggest little" rodeo is in town

"The Greatest Show on Dirt!"

According to JJ the Clown.

Imported princesses, Fort Dalles,

Umatilla, Jefferson...

Peer and praise until they're done.

Denim on denim, top to toe.

Wrangler pleats like rails,

U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co.

Outlegged by news networks that never sleep, outsold by the juggernaut of visual entertainment, the novel doesn't bring us the news as it once did. Or it's easy to think so until you read a book like Joseph O'Neill's splendid, "Netherland." This wholly unexpected novel turns the city once known as Nueve Amsterdam inside out with the tale of a Dutch banker clinging to his crumbling marriage and family in the aftermath of September 11th. It is a fabulous, deeply enjoyable New York story about the fantasies that prop up daily reality - in other words, a deeply New York novel about that deeply New York penchant: new beginnings.

 
The man we're rooting for - and it's impossible not to cheer him on - is Hans van den Broek, a six-foot five, 40-something equity analyst. He spends a good deal of this novel holed up at the Chelsea Hotel, the bohemian landmark where Arthur Miller wrote some of his best known work and Andy Warhol once called home. Something essential has jostled free from Hans' marriage, sending his ex-pat wife back to England with their son, Jake. Hans stays behind, and pours his restless, misbegotten self into a cricket league out on Staten Island, where he meets - and befriends - a Trinidadian entrepreneur of sorts, Chuck Ramkissoon. It is Chuck's dream to build a world-class cricket arena - he doesn't like the word stadium - in Brooklyn.

Rick Steber is a local literary hero, the author of more than 30 books, many of them set in Central Oregon. But it still took more than 100 pages for me to start to care about the main character in his new novel, Forty Candles on a Cowboy Cake. The novel focuses on a character with the awkward handle of Waddy Wilder, a buckaroo on a ranch outside Sisters. It didn't help that Waddy is a malcontent, unhappy with the scourge of developers, but equally irritated by environmentalists working on behalf of "an army dressed according to L.L. Bean, Cabela and Eddie Bauer."