Stone Cowboy

by Mark Jacobs

A lot of Americans vanish into Bolivia. Being a professional magician, Jonathan was just especially good at it. He had come, convinced that its fantastic mountain deserts and mythic Indian cultures infused the place with actual magic - the real thing - in contrast to North America, which had been emptied of it. Worried about his mental state, his straitlaced sister has arrived from the States to find him. She enlists the help of a stranded American named Roger who speaks Spanish and the Aymara Indian dialect, and they set out together. Roger learns that her brother used to perform in public, that he subsists on fruit juice and dope, and that the locals have taken to calling him Flame. Unlike her brother, Roger is desperate to leave. He has done 23 countries in 10 years and is feeling "a candle burning low ... Any unnecessary excitement just might blow it out." Unfortunately, Flame has given up street performance to be the private entertainment for an immensely wealthy criminal oligarch with his own all too exciting talents for making things disappear.

Genres: Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1997

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book years ago but when I recently sorted through my library, I couldn't remember a thing about it, which surprised the heck out of me as I went along. It is not a forgettable story, it is very vivid, darkly comic at times, but generally just dark and mostly sad. How could I have forgotten this book? I can only assume that I read it during one of my own dark spells. I had a few years of fuzziness while my health played games with me. I must have read it then. I know this time it will be hard to forget, hard to stop thinking about it, almost as hard for me to get out of Bolivia as it was for Roger. But did he ever get out of the country?

We meet Roger just as he is leaving prison in La Paz. Roger has roamed the world for years, trying the various drugs available, and basically just being a no good bum surviving in whatever manner he can.

All he wants to do now is leave Bolivia and go home. Give a normal life a try again. Maybe this time he will be able to fit, you know?

But how to do that? Enter Agnes, the last person in the world you might expect to find in a rugged place like Bolivia. She is looking for her brother but she speaks no Spanish and is not at all a Woman Of The World.

Well, it just happens that Roger saw the brother performing magic tricks in the plaza, and he promises to help Agnes find him. But is brother Jonathan really worth all the effort, all the hardship these two endure during their search? Will Roger yield to his baser instincts and steal everything from Agnes, leaving her abandoned and nearly helpless? Or does he discover a slight connection with a surprisingly decent human being deep inside his stone cowboy self?

All he wants is to get away from Bolivia. And he wants his heart back. He wants to BE again, or maybe BE for the first time in his life.

I'm curious about whether or not Bolivia is or ever was the way it is depicted here. If so, it would be a sad place to try to live, even beyond the expected difficulties of the altitude and climate. It appears in the book as both a place of magic and a place of horror.

I never expected to like Roger as much as I did by the end of the book. I hope he does end up getting his heart back. There is no clear black and white result for him. The reader gets to decide. It would be easy to say oh, THIS will happen next, simply because of the other characters involved in the final pages and the events on those pages. But who knows?

I've thought about the book all day and I've changed my last-night's rating from four to five stars. I think both the book and Roger deserve that.

[Lily Malone · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me about 20 pages to get used to the author's style, but after that I really enjoyed this book - a very different read for me and one that I stumbled upon on the recommendation of my hubby. He really enjoyed it and said I should read it.
Given I enjoy a good romance, I loved the unfolding relationship between Roger and Agnes - this was the highlight of the book for me. Also, Roger's growth from the weakling described in the early chapters through to the man who can live up to the word 'hero' and who really becomes Agnes' equal.
I also loved the Bolivian setting and the background of the drug trade - really well described - and I found it set up the atmosphere and the bleak mood of the story so very well.
But the ending!! This book lost a star for the ending which I didn't understand at all. Way too obtuse for me and I felt I'd invested so much with Roger and Agnes through all their travels and troubles, I wanted something far more concrete to finish.

[Hans Ostrom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A psychedelic trip through Peru, featuring a burned-out loser who sometimes acts ethically and often has visions and a woman looking for her magician-brother. Jacobs evokes just how hard it is to live in Peru--for anyone, but especially, of course, for the poor. There is a moral, philosophical aspect to Jacobs writing, including his spy novel, that I find appealing and unforced. In that sense, he reminds me of Graham Greene. Fine writer.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm biased, because a few years before the book came out I wandered along the same route as the main character. Very evocative of places I spent time in. Absorbingly written, too -- though I wonder what readers with no particular interest in Bolivia would think.

[Carol Mann Agency]

Kirkus Review

A burnt-out American doper, fresh from a Bolivian prison, starts out conning a naive social worker by helping her find her magician brother--and ends up conducting her on a tour of the hell that is the coca trade, while gradually recovering his humanity. Ringing new changes on the legacy of Chandler and Traven, this first novel by Jacobs (stories: A Cast of Spaniards, not reviewed), a longtime foreign-service functionary, matches noirish Roger, the Stone Cowboy, whose drug abuse has shorted out body and soul, with Agnes, a prissy Yankee social worker who's come in search of her magician brother Jonathan, now the pet of a major cocaine dealer. Narrating in the louche voice familiar to drug writers from Robert Stone to Jay McInerney, Roger takes Agnes backstage in the so- called war on drugs. Of course, the only way to get to Jonathan-- who seems to be seeking the real magic that fled North America with the coming of the Industrial Revolution--is to descend, and so our odd couple will hear Zen wisdom from the mouths of peasants, go for a wild ride with a mad revolutionary radio-broadcaster, work as forced laborers smashing coca leaves in a jungle pit for a vicious middleman, undergo interrogation and beatings by DEA henchmen--and finally travel with the brother and the druglord to the top of an Andean peak, where the last real magician lives. There, Jonathan will get his wish (he becomes a bird as the druglord executes him), and, like the Cowardly Lion, Roger will get to ask the god La Pachamama for his own wish: ``Give me back my heart.'' An unusual love story, to say the least--a little bit as if The African Queen were mixed with Panic in Needle Park--and an impressive debut from a writer with a generous imagination and a daring, if deeply weird, sense of character and fate. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

[Leksi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read about this book in "The Believer." It was mentioned in the same breath as "Swimming in The Volcano," which is great. I don't know what the reviewer was talking about, however, in regards to this book because it reads like low brow bullshit and pretty much sucks.