Nancy Finch is traveling with her sister and her sister's husband on the Blue Ridge Parkway when they're attacked and robbed by a strange man. The attacker, who calls himself Dwight Andersen, takes Nancy as a hostage, and suddenly Nancy is barreling along the highway toward nowhere in particular. It's a mystery what animates Dwight, though he makes veiled allusions to a twin brother he may or may not have killed. He seems to have no plan, no intent, though Nancy extracts a promise that when they reach the state of Arizona and the Grand Canyon, he'll let her go. As insurance, Dwight takes another hostage, a disgraced judge named Harvey Jolley, though for a while Jolley fails to understand that he's a hostage, and not simply a hitchhiker. The three make an unlikely set, but fate has forced them together, and they are headed west, knit together by the threat of violence.
Nancy and Harvey make a few half-hearted attempts at escape, but it becomes clear over the course of the book that there is something they treasure, too, in the westward flight. For the judge, it's an escape from the death of his wife and the ignominy of his corruption. For Nancy, it's a chance to extricate herself from the selfish and provincial ties that bind her to her sister and her mother, a kind of secondary status as the unwed daughter. It's a strange dynamic: for Dwight, the kidnapper, the trip seems to mean nothing at all, nothing but constant motion; it's the other two who are thinking and feeling animals, and who begin to assign meaning to their flight. The Grand Canyon becomes a symbol of where they are headed, a vast and beautiful chasm where one might really fall into, or escape, and be lost, forever.
I always heard about Doris Betts growing up in North Carolina; her books end up in those "local" shelves you see in Raleigh and Charlotte bookstores, but I'd never read her before. The quality of the writing, the sentences themselves, is high: clever, forceful, funny. For the most part, I didn't buy the intricate backstories that Betts invents for the characters: the judge's orphaned childhood, Nancy's numerous lovers, none of these things seemed relevant or quite convincing. What I was convinced by, however, is the novel's central section, a bravura piece of writing in which Nancy, having escaped from somewhere in Arizona, travels to and descends into the Grand Canyon alone. (If you have ever seen the Grand Canyon, and the many, many signs at the Grand Canyon urging you to take seriously a hike to the bottom, you know why this is a suicidal thing to do.) Nancy never explains why she does this; it's mere compulsion, brought on perhaps by the site of the canyon--why climb down into it? Because it's there. She's halfway down, blistered and delirious from heatstroke, when she hears her name being called: Dwight has followed her into the canyon.
It beggars belief, but it's the kind bold and outrageous choice that the novel could have used more of. It seems right, and gripping, that the showdown between Nancy and Dwight happens in the canyon. Implacable, impersonable, rocky, wild--it seems like his territory. But after a scuffle [spoiler alert], Nancy pushes Dwight over a ledge; he falls and is killed. Funnily enough, this happens at more or less the halfway point in the book. The second half becomes a climb out, both literally and metaphorically: Nancy is rescued by the good samaritan who drove her to the canyon in the first place, and she just so happens to have a handsome, prickly, and available sun for the battered and sunburnt Nancy to fall in love with. This stuff is OK. I have to admit that Heading West felt to me like a tremendous novella packed between two chunks of protective styrofoam. But even Sisyphus has to roll the ball up the hill again.
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