In the world of rock climbing, the term “crux” refers to the most difficult part of a climb. In his eponymous second novel, Gabriel Tallent has mastered its equivalent in the realm of serious fiction: a work that offers emotional depth and resonance equal to its many thrills and plot twists. CRUX is about hopes and dreams and how they can be realized despite all the ways the world conspires to frustrate them, sometimes casually and sometimes cruelly. It’s a story that can be read and enjoyed on multiple levels, all of which are rewarding.

The plot turns on the relationship of two equally appealing protagonists --- high school seniors Dan Redburn and Tamma Callahan --- who live in the Mojave Desert near the Joshua Tree National Park and share a passion for climbing. For them, as Tamma puts it, the allure of this exhilarating but dangerous sport is “about facing death and pain and darkness and your own demons to do something cool; to climb is to be almost shi**ing yourself with fear and yet to make the next move anyway.”

"CRUX is an old-fashioned novel in the best sense of that word. There are real stakes in the lives of these characters. That’s why we find ourselves caring about their struggles, laughing and crying with them as we share their joys and sorrows."

Dan and Tamma aren’t romantic partners (she’s gay), but they’re soulmates whose lives, as high school ends, seem to be headed in strikingly different directions. As his school counselor describes Dan, he’s “brilliant, passionate, voluble, eloquent,” bound for college if he can secure the financial aid he’ll need to supplement the modest sum his parents have put aside for his education. That same counselor finds Dan’s friendship with Tamma --- “snaggletoothed and cattywampus, big ears peeking out through tangled hair” --- inexplicable, as she’s counting the days until her formal education will end and she can pursue life as a “rad climber chick.”

But their lives are linked in another way. At age 18, Dan’s mother, Alexandra, produced a 900-page bestselling novel while working as a waitress in the same restaurant as Tamma’s mother, Kendra. Her writing career foundered after her second novel, and now she awaits what she believes will be an early death after the discovery of a congenital heart defect that could be corrected only temporarily by surgery.

Kendra lives nearby in a trailer with her much younger boyfriend, a drug dealer, after Tamma’s father leaves her. The jealousy she nurses over her former friend’s brief run of good fortune only highlights the depth of the gulf that separates success and failure in these two lives.

Tallent’s depiction of how Dan and Tamma, for all the intensity of their friendship, know that their paths inevitably will diverge is subtle but effective. Tamma is the more interesting of the pair, displaying a wicked sense of humor and an impressive verbal felicity for someone who has so little interest in her school work. And when her older sister’s family experiences a crisis, she reveals a tender side of her personality that’s in sharp contrast to her fierce, daredevil essence.

Dan, on the other hand, pushes back against what seems to be his destiny, falling into depression when he comes to terms with its seeming inevitability. Instead of relishing the prospect of enrolling at an elite college, he dreams of becoming a “dirtbag” and of going “out onto the White Rim with my friend and climb sandstone towers at the peril of our lives, swim in the Colorado River, wander slot canyons and search our Anasazi ruins hidden in hanging valleys,” even as that shimmering vision takes on the quality of a desert mirage.

While CRUX has many grim, sometimes stomach-churning, scenes --- disastrous falls, life-and-death moments in the ICU, and a serious injury to a child --- it’s nothing like the unremitting bleakness of Tallent’s debut novel, MY ABSOLUTE DARLING, whose teenage protagonist suffered from shocking parental abuse. Through all the highs and lows of their young lives, don’t be surprised if you’re cheering for Dan and Tamma one moment and wincing at their poor choices the next.

When I reviewed MY ABSOLUTE DARLING for Bookreporter in 2017, I criticized Tallent for, among other things, his overwrought prose. Despite its starkly beautiful setting and some heart-stopping scenes on Dan and Tamma’s climbs that would have given him the opportunity to indulge that same instinct, he demonstrates admirable restraint here. There are moments when his descriptions of the intricacies of a climb (he’s an avid climber himself) may seem impenetrable to one not familiar with the process. But it’s possible to sense the thrill and danger of the sport and feel the emotional force of those passages without lingering too long over the details.

CRUX is an old-fashioned novel in the best sense of that word. There are real stakes in the lives of these characters. That’s why we find ourselves caring about their struggles, laughing and crying with them as we share their joys and sorrows. Most telling of all, we leave their lives feeling a real sense of regret at the parting.