Painted Desert

by Frederick Barthelme

Frederick Barthelme's haunting new novel picks up where his acclaimed previous book, The Brothers, left off. Junior college professor Del Tribute and his cyber-muckraker friend Jen catch some old news footage of the L.A. riots, some of that vivid close-up slow motion shaky-cam stuff with the fires blazing and people getting trashed, and Jen, in particular, is incensed by the barbarity of the scene. At her insistence she and Del, her father, Mike, and her friend Penny decide to step out of the shadows and head to ground zero - Los Angeles - to do something, anything, about this particular horror. Their journey takes them from Biloxi, Mississippi, to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, from Alamogordo to the kitschy tourist sites of New Mexico and Arizona. Jen sets up a scourge of e-mail spamming and internet newsgroup posts about the atrocities of the riots, but then one night in Dallas she gets a strange message back from a guy in Las Vegas named Durrell Dobson, who really believes that anarchy is