The winter winds buffet the empty highways of Utah's high desert between Price and Moab where Lullaby Road's loner narrator, Ben Jones, runs his daily deliveries to the outcasts and oddballs that make the place home. A self-described "Indian-Jew, half-breed trucker," Ben first appeared in James Anderson's debut, The Never-Open Desert Diner, as did many of this novel's portfolio of offbeat locals. Founder of publisher Breitenbush Books, Anderson has been around writers and books long enough to know how to augment a somewhat farfetched plot with a delicious cast of colorful characters, startling metaphors and a self-deprecating protagonist with an eye for the absurd.
The second in what will be a trilogy, Lullaby Road kicks off with Ben heading down the highway with an unexpected cab full of kids and a dog. The reclusive and unpredictable owner of the Stop 'N' Gone Truck Stop directs Ben to a four-year-old in a blanket, abandoned beside a pump with a large guard dog for warmth and an attached note asking Ben to take care of them. His duplex neighbor's babysitter calls in sick, and she throws her infant and a diaper bag in his cab so she can make her shift at Walmart. The softhearted, usually live-and-let-live Ben wishes for more than lullabies to shepherd this sudden family through the storms and dangers that often fill his workdays. Surprised at his protective generosity, he reflects: "If I was going over a cliff I didn't need someone to show me the way. I can do stupid all by myself." From experience he knows that anything can happen in the desert "halfway between nowhere and nothing."
As the wind whips his truck and trailer, Ben meets up with the familiar religious wacko preacher at the Ace Hardware First Church of the Desert Cross who daily lugs a large wooden cross along the highway. Diverted when his truck gets side-swiped in the low visibility snow, Ben takes it to an obese repair welder in his stained overalls like "a Carhartt summer sausage." Stopping for gas, he is threatened by the driver of a "rich man's circus train"--a Super-Duty pick-up towing an Airstream and a "chromed flatbed carrying two camo-colored ATVs." He wisely steps back, musing: "You can beat the brains out of someone but it's almost impossible to beat any brains in." Ben's adventures are as amusing as they are perilous, but underneath, he is just a guy raised in foster homes trying to stay sober and cigarette-free while doing right in a desolate but breathtaking land. He gets by "putting one foot in front of the other, my eyes on my boots, and willing myself not to look too far down the road." Lullaby Road is a triumphant mix of landscape, character, wit and sagacity wrapped in a noir thriller. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.
Shelf Talker: In the second of the Utah desert trilogy featuring lone wolf truck driver Ben Jones, James Anderson cooks up a canny story with gusto and rich local color.