Native Air

In a debut novel from Green Writers Press by Jonathan Howland, the austere beauty and high exposure of mountain adventure provide the context and the measure for what it means to be alive for climbing partners Joe Holland and Pete Hunter—until one of them isn't.

When the book opens, it is the mid-80s. Joe Holland, the novel's narrator, is a climber and a seeker, but mostly he's Pete Hunter's shadow. The two meet in college and spend the next ten years living at the base of any rock that appears scalable, most of them near Yosemite and California's High Sierra.

The joys and strains of their friendship comprise the novel's first half. In the second, the bare bones—obsession, grief, love, and repair—come into stark relief when Pete's grown son Will calls Joe back into climbing, into the past, and into breathless vitality.

Native Air is itself a climb, tracing physical acts in a vertical domain as well as the life events stitched between adventures that yoke them. When Will summons Joe back to the mountains, it is Joe's chance to recover something true, to mourn his friend, and to fall in love with wonders nearer to heaven than any steeple. The past and present press upon each other like a folded clock.

Readers of this book are doers as well as fans of those who entertain risk and nurse obsession. They get lost and found in Muir essays and Knausgaard. They admire Annie Proulx, Norman Maclean, and Russell Banks. According to climber-author Dan Duane, Native Air belongs on the bookshelf of anyone whose heart registers the beauty and danger of exposure.