Mountain City by Gregory Martin. North Point Press: 193 pages. $21.00.

A hawk flies through the broken window of an abandoned house to snatch a mouse. A storeowner tells a joke that simultaneously disparages and confirms his Basque culture. A six-year-old child in 1919 visits a town for the first time.

Like the most spare black and white photographs, rural Nevada, townspeople, and buildings, manifest in prose as clear as dry air. The author, Gregory Martin, appears only occasionally in these shots, and when he does, he is not the primary image, more a contrasting element. Martin’s subject is Mountain City, a place he knows and loves, “a place of repetition, a Western archetype for hope and failed hope and failure.”

As a meditation on a region, its history, and its people, “Mountain City” is reminiscent of Wallace Stegner’s “Wolf Willow.” Stegner’s wonderful work is a series of portraits, some reflecting on the nature of the American, some fictionalizing events, some featuring Stegner, glowing with grief, longing, anger—all directed by his strong and central voice. Martin, however, merely hands us his word photos, with little or no comment. Martin does not sermonize about his childhood, or the lost “West,” though he does have a great and deep love for Mountain City and its inhabitants. The result is a multivocal collection which invites readers to form their own intellectual or emotional responses.

33 people live in Mountain City, 31 by the end of the book—among them Martin’s grandparents, his uncle and aunt, his cousin, “the widow’s club,” as well as the inhabitants of the nearby reservation, and a number of passers through. Some of Mountain City’s inhabitants, including Martin’s family, are Basque (whom the locals call “Bascos”) who settled in the area during the nineteenth century to herd sheep or work in mines. Now, the mines are abandoned and ranches are scattered. Knowing the town is nearly ghost, some residents have moved out of their houses into trailers next door, nearly inseparable, as if their existence has been double exposed with the old places.

There are no young people in Mountain City who might take over Tremewan’s store, the town’s heart. Mel, probably the store’s final owner, is a jokester and storyteller. At once wisecracking and generous, Mel figures prominently, as he should. Martin shows him in his full complexity: the Mel that cares for his aging father-in-law, and the tired and depressed Mel, who pours himself a few highballs at the end of each workday before he walks home, perhaps to assuage the loneliness of being the caretaker of the aging inhabitants of an aging town.

The beauty of “Mountain City” lies in its spare, elegant writing that lovingly documents the people that both created and lived in a lost age of mining and ranching and backbreaking work. Martin’s photographic realism gives his readers a gift of deeper understanding: “For Gramps and his dad, the dream of the West never meant what Louis L’Amour or Hollywood said and continued to say it meant, over and over and over. They never thought they were living out a horse opera. They took the jobs that were available, because they didn’t want to go someplace else. They were trying to figure a way to stick to the landscape, with whatever glue was handy.”

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.