Books in Brief: The Tracker

The Tracker, by Tom Brown Jr., with William Jon Watkins (Berkley, 229 pp., $2.50). The reports from the suburbs were grim before Tom Brown. Updike saw swarms of bed-hoppers wrapped in silly dreams. O’Hara observed social climbers skilled with shot-glass and ledger book. Troops of sociologists found the bored, the angry, the exhausted. Hardly anybody uncovered anything resembling hope. Now comes an autobiography that shows an urban fringe full of characters and incidents, conflict and resolution, mystery and revelation—in short, full of life. Brown grew up in that great back lot between subdivisions, the New Jersey Pine Barrens. His neighbor was a transplanted Apache who taught him to sneak within touching distance of deer and walk comfortably through blizzards bare-chested. If an animal struck his fancy, he ranged over field and swamp until he tracked it down. Eventually he began to understand their lives, and knowledge gave rise to sympathy. He became a forest creature himself. When wild dogs treed him for three days he amused himself by watching the labors of ants. He busted apart a poachers’ shack to avenge the death of a deer. With a friend he built a log cabin in the thickest part of the woods, and when joyriders wandered near he stuck branches in his hair and played wild man to scare them off. Brown wasn’t the only one fashioning a different sort of life between the housing tracts. In the briar-ridden interstices lived a woman who talked to spirits and a man who fed wild dogs. Gangsters drove dark sedans down back roads to dump corpses. Renegades were the norm; Updike people entered Brown’s world only by mistake and often didn’t come out again. Once he found the body of a weekend hunter who’d got lost and panicked. The man died within shouting distance of a highway. Doctors called it a heart attack. Brown calls it the penalty for ignoring the forces of nature. Respect for those forces forms the basis of a personal religion that was the ultimate outgrowth of his apprenticeship with the Apache. Its tenets are not set forth in this book, but they nourish it like ground water. It is a deeply spiritual work, the more fascinating for its setting: from a hill Brown could see the skyline of Atlantic City.

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Paul T. Hornak

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The Tracker, by Tom Brown Jr., with William Jon Watkins (Berkley, 229 pp., $2.50). The reports from the suburbs were grim before Tom Brown. Updike saw swarms of bed-hoppers wrapped in silly dreams. O’Hara observed social climbers skilled with shot-glass and ledger book. Troops of sociologists found the bored, the angry, the exhausted. Hardly anybody uncovered anything resembling hope. Now comes an autobiography that shows an urban fringe full of characters and incidents, conflict and resolution, mystery and revelation—in short, full of life. Brown grew up in that great back lot between subdivisions, the New Jersey Pine Barrens. His neighbor was a transplanted Apache who taught him to sneak within touching distance of deer and walk comfortably through blizzards bare-chested. If an animal struck his fancy, he ranged over field and swamp until he tracked it down. Eventually he began to understand their lives, and knowledge gave rise to sympathy. He became a forest creature himself. When wild dogs treed him for three days he amused himself by watching the labors of ants. He busted apart a poachers’ shack to avenge the death of a deer. With a friend he built a log cabin in the thickest part of the woods, and when joyriders wandered near he stuck branches in his hair and played wild man to scare them off. Brown wasn’t the only one fashioning a different sort of life between the housing tracts. In the briar-ridden interstices lived a woman who talked to spirits and a man who fed wild dogs. Gangsters drove dark sedans down back roads to dump corpses. Renegades were the norm; Updike people entered Brown’s world only by mistake and often didn’t come out again. Once he found the body of a weekend hunter who’d got lost and panicked. The man died within shouting distance of a highway. Doctors called it a heart attack. Brown calls it the penalty for ignoring the forces of nature. Respect for those forces forms the basis of a personal religion that was the ultimate outgrowth of his apprenticeship with the Apache. Its tenets are not set forth in this book, but they nourish it like ground water. It is a deeply spiritual work, the more fascinating for its setting: from a hill Brown could see the skyline of Atlantic City.