Walking Dunes

The sandhills stretch across the West Texas plains for 60 miles. As much as ten miles wide in places, they are a gleaming, sugary whiteness. The winds keep a trickle of sand moving on their peaks; in high winds the sand shifts so fast they say the dunes walk. So, too, can a handsome young man’s intellect and sensibility belie his unreliable character; so, too, can his sense of identity shift as he is buffeted by the storm of circumstance a single fateful year brings. Eighteen year old David Puckett is torn between his desire for and his fear of intimacy—between his yearning for two very different definitions of success. Artistry and passion are embodied in one girl, the avoidance of intimacy and the path to power in another. His story is set in the late 1950s, an era that has become mythologized as an age of carefree innocence and conservative consensus. Walking Dunes gives us another glimpse of life as it lay on the lip of the ’60s, life as beset by poverty, violence, and misery as it was buoyed by rock and roll, television, and the explosion of the suburbs. There is, too, in David’s story the poignancy of a failed family, the sweet awkwardness of young love, the fierceness of early ambition, the bitterness of loss. The lives of teenagers, so often perceived as trivial and commonplace, surprise and ultimately shock the reader, as a boy sets the course on which he will become a man.