Border Music Book

Most people don't run out the back door of a place called the Rainbow Bar in Dillon, Minnesota, with someone they don't even know, get in a pickup truck, drive all day, and end up without any clothes on in a motel room. But that's what Texas Jack Carmine did with Linda Lobo. It was the kind of thing Jack was famous for doing. The people who knew Texas Jack Carmine - such as songwriter Bobby McGregor and Jack's uncle Vaughn Rhomer back in Iowa - called him God's only freeborn soul, rider of the summer roads, traveler of the far places. Where he was headed with dark-haired, long-legged Linda was not just back to his one-horse Texas ranch. It was somewhere he had never been: face to face with his own heart and the wild, strange things that live there. Border Music is the story of Jack and Linda, of long, hot days on a high desert ranch, nights wild with loving beneath West Texas skies, and times when their relationship tears them both apart. It's about Vietnam and the Midwest, and Vaughn Rhomer, an old man who,tries in his own fumbling way to be free. It's about men and women who work hard and care intensely, about romance and the passion that you only find once...and you never stop wanting to find again.

Publishers Weekly

The lead sentence of Waller's potential bestseller is a first line that may turn up in quizzes, though not of the literary variety. ``When this nameless piece a' shit tore off Linda Lobo's G-string instead of sticking money in it... Texas Jack Carmine went crazy-over-the-edge....'' But make no mistake about it: while Texas Jack Carmine is neither as well-educated nor as well-spoken as Robert Kincaid or Michael Tillman, the protagonists of Waller's previous novels, he is equally intelligent, sensitive and romantic under the facade of his raunchy, beer-guzzling persona. With a twang in his voice matched by the low-down grit of Waller's prose, Jack is a restless man who lives ``sweet and free... a rider of summer roads, traveler of far places.'' After he impulsively rescues long-legged, ``high-assed'' Linda from her job in a Minnesota bar, he discovers that she is the woman of his dreams. Jack takes Linda home to his one-horse ranch in Texas where they enjoy an idyllic year, doomed to end, however, as readers realize immediately, since Waller applies foreshadowing with a sledgehammer touch. Jack's ``spells,'' flashbacks to the killing he did in Vietnam, are the reason that the lovers eventually part. But Jack assumes legendary proportions in the lives of everyone whose path he crosses; all eventually realize that "`he set us free... he loved us in a special way and in doin' so taught us to think better of ourselves.'' A silly subplot concerns Jack's disillusioned uncle Vaughn Rhomer, a produce manager in a Iowa supermarket, who secretly nurtures his own romantic dreams and adventures, and finally realizes that Jack has ``shown him the way.'' Waller is dangerously self-indulgent here; his style has become a shtick, and this story is all atmosphere and rugged sentiment and no action. His fans will probably buy it, but there's no magic in this tale. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selection. (Feb.)