| dc.description.abstract | In Transit Stakes I attempted to continue a theme that I began in my first novel, Alligator Gar. That is, the theme of geographical movement as it affects the development of fictional characters. In a larger sense, the theme is one of characters' dependency upon place. The geographical movement in Transit Stakes is from Fort Worth, Texas, to Mercedes, Texas. The trip from Fort Worth to Mercedes takes place during the Christmas vacation, and it occurs in the last third of the novel. During that trip, the characters that have been established in the first two-thirds of the novel all experience change, loss, and sadness, but out of their loss they all gain a deeper understanding of themselves and each other. The central character, Nathan Silex, is an English professor. In Fort Worth, he meets Candelaria Maldonado and falls in love with her. She is the beautiful daughter of a Mexican-American funeral director of Weslaco. Candelaria has left her husband in Weslaco, where he had been working for her father. Candelaria's twin brother, Carlos, is in Iowa City, working on a degree in creative writing. He lives there with his pretty wife, Gracie. At Christmas time, in the time of the novel, Carlos and Gracie cane south to visit their parents in Weslaco, in the lower Rio Grande Valley. They come through Fort Worth to pick up Candelaria and take her home with them. Candelaria is reluctant to leave Nathan, even for a week, so she devises the plan of taking him along with them, but she plans to pretend that he is Carlos' friend, rather than her lover. As the four characters drive south it becomes apparent that their relationship is a complex one. Gracie flirts with Nathan, and as she nears the Valley, Candelaria's pretense that Nathan is Carlos' friend, rather than her lover, seems to grow from pretense into reality. Their destination is a funeral home. The funeral home assumes importance as a symbol when the reader learns that a minor character, Nathan's retired Scots friend, has been senselessly killed by a drunken cowboy who was poaching deer at night. Throughout the novel there is a great deal of eating and drinking. Gluttony becomes important as a secondary theme when Nathan observes that Chaucer wrote: "After gluttony then comes lechery, and the two sins are so closely related that it is oftentimes difficult to tell them apart." The foursome eats a gourmet lunch in Fort Worth, they have a feast of German food for dinner in Fredericksburg, they have a big breakfast the next morning, followed by Mexican food for lunch, and they have Carlos' father's specialty, glazed pheasant, when they arrive in Mercedes. Connected to their eating and drinking is Candelaria's repudiation of her adulterous relationship with Nathan. She decides to return to her husband, who has come back to work for her father in the funeral home. Nathan leaves Candelaria, Carlos, and Gracie in the Valley and returns to Fort Worth to inherit the land of his old friend, the Scot. He learns, later, that Gracie is pregnant with his child. | |
