[REVIEW] Barbara Byar's IN THE DESERT

There’s a particular genre of American art that shines a slatted light across the loneliest places in this ever-vast country, spaces in which humans are inseparable from the natural world. Paris, Texas, The Searchers, Badlands, Wild at Heart, No Country for Old Men. It’s trickier to capture in books. And now more rarely achieved, as our national collective seems increasingly concerned over the encroaching maw of modernity: techy novels and dystopias; the ubiquitous big city novel; the internet novel; autofiction in which narrators squirm amid the confines of their own limited experience; characters moving about a world in which physical and digital realms appear fused.