Luther Mathias sells 鈥渟nake oil鈥 in scrubby West Texas dirt towns. He learns that substance is never a substitute for style and eventually develops his own remedies that promise to cure any ailment a man might suffer. In time, his imagination and ambition combine to mold him into medicine鈥檚 version of Elmer Gantry: loved and hated, imponderably wealthy and famous, powerful and pursued.
The Very Air is a compelling exploration of human motives and hidden meanings. It is a detailed picture of America鈥檚 myth of the rugged individual in the psychological and narrative tradition of The Great Gatsby and Citizen Kane. With a resonant sense of the period and culture, Douglas Bauer evokes the freewheeling feel of the old Southwest in the charlatans of our own era. The Very Air shows, through storytelling both exhilarating and chilling, that the past is prologue and that our personal histories indeed shape the course of our individual futures.
鈥淐hillingly eloquent and very much in the American grain.鈥濃Newsday, Dan Cryer
鈥. . . suspenseful, poignant, and irresistibly entertaining. Bauer makes some wonderful observations about life in America during the 1900s, and about humanity鈥檚 eternal need for illusion, and his characterization is sharp and funny.鈥濃Publisher鈥檚 Weekly
