The Loss of Leon Meed

By Josh Emmons

Scribner (2005), $24

According to Northern California native Josh Emmons, Eureka was founded when ambitious miners set out to find gold, found none, and stayed, drifting numbly into self-imposed exile. That same attachment to place fuels the modern-day residents in his inventive first book, The Loss of Leon Meed, a pile of character studies that somehow finds a novelistic arc while eloquently capturing the North Coast's small-town, edge-of-the-world atmosphere, not unlike what Denis Johnson's Already Dead: A California Gothic did for the Lost Coast. The simple plot -- a man named Leon Meed disappears and appears, unwillingly, freaking out those he comes into brief contact with -- is little more than a skeleton upon which Emmons hangs his stunning sentences. Just as impressive is his ability to embody a range of characters: an alcoholic, a gay man, an old man, a Wiccan, and so on, giving each equal narrative time, although some succeed better than others (the eternally pissed Shane and the newly sober Prentiss could support an entire book). Ultimately, Emmons scrambles a bit to resolve the myriad conflicts, and you wish he would have simply kept going. Leon Meed may be slightly flawed as a novel, but its pages are brilliant.