Accompanying him on his road trip is the one-armed, clear-eyed stranger Randy, another lapsed Mormon, with a mysterious past and mysterious people following him. Despite the implicit menace, Randy makes an entertaining sidekick, and DeFrain gets a lot of mileage out of juxtaposing Brian’s quest for self-forgiveness and Randy’s pragmatic toughness. As Brian drives and Randy dozes, Brian seems to reach an epiphany of sorts:

Driving past the vineyards struggling to open their leaves and unburdening themselves of the grapes that spring from the water of the air, the fog-berries, I, too, feel absolved of my life. It is as though I have given myself over to the highest power who will have me, and I’m setting sail for the plains and the mountains beyond. You have to close a door to open it again, my dad would say.

“Can you swerve a little fucking more?” Randy asks without raising his head from where he has nodded off against the glass. He raises his silver hook and scratches at his moustache and then rubs his eye with the loop of the hook.

Eventually Brian and Randy find their way to Nebraska and the home of some of Randy’s friends. In this setting we come to see Randy as Brian’s inverse, outwardly a drifter but psychologically better grounded than Brian, having assembled a “family” that accepts him.

One curiosity of The Salt Palace is its lengthy footnotes, most explaining some aspect of Mormonism or professional basketball, Brian’s obsession. The footnotes related to Mormonism are fascinating, at least to someone as unfamiliar with its history as I am. Yet while I wanted to believe that the story behind the Utah Jazz would add another layer of understanding to the novel, I ultimately lost interest in the vagaries of the team and began to resent each interruption to my reading.

A third, far less frequent type of footnote gives us character background that in a more conventional novel might simply find its place in the text. Footnote 75, for instance, tells us that “Brian’s mother’s sister, Janice, was excommunicated by the Mormon church for refusing to denounce her polygamous relationship with a man she met and married in St. George, Utah. Brian’s family excommunicated her as well, though Brian suspects his mother was more forgiving than she let on at the time.” This information would seem essential, except for the fact that Janice is not a character in the novel, nor is any reference made to her in the text itself. These short sidebars with the author, acknowledging the artifice of the whole enterprise, are amusing, and infrequent enough to remain enjoyable.

The Salt Palace is an odd hybrid, at heart a fairly simple, even archetypal story adorned with some of the trappings of postmodernism. Mysteries remain stubbornly unexplained, and the novel leaves us with a menacing man knocking at Brian’s door. DeFrain proffers a morsel of resolution in Brian’s vision of his sins “diminished, if not burned completely away,” only to snatch it back a page later: “There’s no closure in what I have at this moment, though, only the cold resonance resonating.” A compelling and entertaining read, The Salt Palace is a truly impressive first novel.

— Deborah Mead