"Salt River" (Walker), by James Sallis, is a slim thriller, the last of a trilogy dealing with John Turner's retreat to a Southern backwater town in Tennessee, trying to escape his past. In elegantly wrought prose, his reductive approach succeeds in moving well-beyond the usual conventions of the genre.

The scene is set with the opening line, "Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left," which were Turner's girlfriend's last words before she was murdered in the last installment of the series.

Turner's life is filled with his own exes: ex-cop, ex-husband, ex-con and ex-therapist.

He's trying to settle into small-town life, hoping to be reclusive, escape real world events, to try - as he paraphrases Descartes - and deal with the fact that all our ills come from being unable to sit quietly alone in a room.

Apparently unrelated events start to grow toward one another: his long-lost son drives his stolen car into city hall, there are nefarious doings in nearby towns, and an old friend returns, banjo in hand, with the law on his trail.

There's lots of existential weather - internal and external - and the story is rendered in gritty direct prose with a poetic noir sensibility.

What starts out disguised as a thriller morphs into an elegiac lament for the decay of things and places held dear as they slide from our grasp toward the inevitable.

"The Age of American Unreason" (Pantheon) by Susan Jacoby is a dissection of a current growing and unsettling trend and a historical overview of its roots in America.

This cultural stance - one that is becoming more common, more widely accepted - is an insidious blend that disparages rationalism (there are no facts, just opinions), exalts ignorance (self-education is less important than self-improvement), and is vehemently anti-intellectual (celebrity and fame replace actual ability).

You just have to look around, as Jacoby does, to see what this combination has given us: the fundamentalist assaults on evolution; the glut of reality - "just us" - TV shows, infotainment and a universe of pop culture junk thought; the fabrication of the reasons for going to war; the denial of global warming; and an Internet on which everyone is an expert on something with little or no attention paid to expertise.

Jacoby notes that the roots of these trends are deeply imbedded in American culture, but our current predilection for, and dependence on, a culture of distraction, in lieu of engagement, are making things worse.

It is, in her words, "an over-arching crisis of memory and knowledge," one that proudly celebrates both underachievers and the pleasures of being dumb and dumber.

- Kirk Robertson is a

resident of Fallon.