[Graywolf; 2025]
When I mention that I live in New Mexico, I find that people who haven’t been here often have two misconceptions. The first is that New Mexico is hot, arid, and sandy—which is to say that the entire state is southern New Mexico. The second is that New Mexico is a place of bohemian art galleries, pueblo-style architecture, and expats from New York or Los Angeles—that the entire state is northern New Mexico (or, more specifically, Santa Fe or Taos). Often, people have an oddly hybridized image of what the state is: southern New Mexico’s landscape mixed with northern New Mexico’s politics and culture.
Joshua Wheeler’s 2018 essay collection Acid West was in part an effort to dispel such misconceptions. Wheeler was born and raised in Alamogordo, in the southern part of the state, and his family’s history in the area stretches back generations. In Acid West’s introductory essay, Wheeler writes,
There is no easy way to explain that here in the underbelly, south of the 34th parallel, which cuts the state in half, things are different. We use the abbreviation SNM for our home, and maybe that is a good explanation, how there is something awkward but accurate in the way it comes off the tongue like S&M. Most of us SNM-ans feel some pride or gratification in the way our half of the state is abused or forgotten entirely—it makes us the better half because we endure the most fiscal pain or Border Patrol harassment or tourism-department shafting or general ignorance about our existence. We are just the bottom. And we like it.
As this excerpt suggests, Wheeler’s writing throughout Acid West is flamboyant and slangy in ways that make the essays engaging and often quite funny. At the same time, the prose sometimes overreaches and succumbs to repetition or other clumsiness. In this passage, for example, the second sentence contradicts the first.
Of particular interest to Wheeler in Acid West are the space race and the military-industrial complex. Space and the military loom large in SNM thanks to the presence of institutions such as the U.S. government-owned White Sands Missile Range, where, among other things, the Trinity test (the world’s first nuclear explosion) took place near the end of World War II. One of the collection’s essays deals with Trinity and its aftermath, and another focuses on Spaceport America, a multibillion-dollar terminal that was built to anchor the United States’ hypothetical space-tourism economy. Through institutions such as these, the federal government and private industry alike have shaped southern New Mexico in significant ways. Acid West is in part an attempt to dissect these influences.
One incident that Wheeler recounts in Acid West may have constituted the germ of his debut novel, The High Heaven. “The family ranch was sold when I was a kid, what was left of its thirteen hundred acres anyway, after the government gobbled it up using eminent domain until the ranch house was surrounded by a missile range,” Wheeler writes in “After the Fall,” referring to White Sands. “Look at a map and you can see this: a vast gray stretch in the gut of Southern New Mexico, the largest military installation in the United States, its eastern border below Highway 70 straight as an arrow save one notch, where the ranch house sits, where Great-Granddaddy sat on the porch with a rifle and said, Y’all will have to go around.” (In an act of limited due diligence, I hereby report that such a notch is, in fact, visible on Google Maps.)
The connection between this detail and the conflict that kicks off The High Heaven is obvious enough. The novel’s first section, which is set in 1967, centers largely on the perspective of Oliver Gently, a rancher in southern New Mexico whose property is menaced by the expansion of a missile range on one side and a NASA test facility on the other. These facilities’ growth is related to the Vietnam War, in which Oliver’s son is fighting, and to the Space Race: The United States is trying to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. Even without seizing Oliver’s property outright, the government has transformed the land that surrounds it. “Around the Gently place were all kinds of blinking lights, all switched on in the last decade or two, unnatural in color and mechanical in strobe, clear across the horizon from the army’s missile range to the NASA test track, from the border patrol to the air force base,” Wheeler writes. “The ranch was stuck like a black hole at the center of all that twinkling modernity.”
The conflict here, between a rancher and a government intent on seizing his property, resembles the conflict that motivates Edward Abbey’s 1962 Fire on the Mountain. Both novels pit a southern New Mexican rancher against a government determined to seize his land for a missile range, and both use this dispute to explore the shifting nature of the American West. But The High Heaven is much stranger and farther-reaching than Abbey’s novel, and the eminent-domain conflict takes something of a backseat when Oliver encounters, in the forest around SNM’s Sacramento Mountains, a Scripture-spouting girl named Izzy, who was wounded while escaping a government attack on the cult in which she was raised. The cult’s theology, we learn, was a fusion of Christian fundamentalism and Space Age mysticism, and Izzy spent the last few weeks of her life rubbing salt and mud on her deceased mother in an attempt to ready her for resurrection by “a spaceship of angels.”
The High Heaven twines millenarian theology and outer space. Although Oliver Gently is the focal character of the novel’s first section, the remainder of the novel inhabits Izzy’s perspective, following her life across decades as she tries to separate, or perhaps reconcile, Space Age rhetoric and faith. Wheeler weaves together a series of motifs related to cosmology (especially the moon), television (the primary medium by which Izzy and the rest of the U.S. experience the Space Race), deep time, vision and blindness, and Biblical allegory, among others—a symbolic network sufficiently elaborate that the novel’s progress seems, at times, to be governed equally by symbolic permutation as by the unfolding of a narrative. The High Heaven is essentially realistic in its approach, yet in the prominence of its symbolism, the novel also aligns itself with those literary traditions for which realism is a matter of secondary concern. The novel engages self-consciously with several of these traditions: Its three main sections are entitled “A Tale of the Acid West,” “A Texas Picaresque,” and “A Southern Gothic Silhouette.” Each section riffs off its respective conventions, and the reader reads on in part to see how Wheeler will rework these traditions.
Wheeler marries a memoirist’s skill for exposition to a poet’s knack for image and sound. Although Acid West’s sentences sometimes skewed mauve, The High Heaven is written with a restraint that reflects the author’s evolution as a stylist. At the same time, Wheeler retains a penchant for idiosyncratic diction, colorful adverbs, and enjoyably off-kilter constructions. “[Oliver’s] daddy used to collapse at the dinner table after a day riding range. But then whiskey and beans and he’d get that second wind while ranting on atom bombs,” Wheeler writes, and “[Oliver] stood in the entryway of Bajada Books where one cat necked on his boot while another sat snobbishly near the register,” and “Oliver set his hat on the counter aggressively near Jolly’s ice cream and finally pulled up a stool and sat beside the pale bull in the bolo tie.” Sentences such as these are part of what give the novel’s first section its “acid” quality, and at times, they echo the rhythms of Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s acid western par excellence. In the last of these sentences, for instance, the stacking-up of phrases with “and” calls to mind one of McCarthy’s signature structures.
The High Heaven’s second section, “A Texas Picaresque,” toys with the picaresque’s conventions in ways both obvious and subtle. Typically, a picaresque novel centers on a dishonest but lovable rascal who must summon reserves of cleverness to outwit a series of antagonists. In The High Heaven, Izzy’s gender is the most straightforward subversion of this formula. Where picaresques dating back to Don Quixote have tended to focus on male heroes, Izzy is decidedly feminine, and we follow her as she grows from an orphaned urchin into a tomboy, a honky-tonk queen, and then, after a series of disasters, a farmer who takes a decidedly maternal interest in a crop of marijuana plants. Wheeler handles Izzy’s transformations adroitly, and at its best moments, his prose achieves a potent fusion of symbol, genre, and narrative. One of the novel’s most enjoyable sequences sees Izzy and her lover, who sells Rolls-Royces in small-town Texas during the oil boom of the early ‘80s, embrace the high life after scamming their way into tens of thousands of dollars. When the couple’s schemes backfire, Izzy finds her way to the pot cultivation job, and the novel’s preoccupations with growth and transformation, space, and waste come together forcefully. Transformed into a kind of postlapsarian Eve, Izzy cultivates her crops with a fertilizer made of blood and excrement, and the plants prove remarkably responsive to lunar cycles. This idyll ends with the eruption of the Space Race into Izzy’s life in a powerfully effective twist.
The novel’s final section, “A Southern Gothic Silhouette,” jumps ahead to 2024, to the last day of Izzy’s career as a social worker at New Orleans General Hospital. In New Orleans, Izzy has developed a fascination with an affliction that some of her former patients suffer—a condition that prevents them from seeing the moon. Over the course of this section, Izzy struggles to make sense of “moonlessness,” as she calls it, amidst a New Orleans perpetually threatened by catastrophe. With the guidance of a former patient named Teeter, Izzy becomes a minor livestreaming celebrity, attracting the interest of viewers who are fascinated by moonlessness and by Izzy’s efforts to cure the condition. Like the rest of the novel, this section is written with skill and sensitivity. If the action feels, at times, too freighted with symbolism, and if certain set pieces, such as a conspiracy-theoretical podcaster who unearths parts of Izzy’s backstory, seem a touch artificial, these effects are perhaps in keeping with the gothic tradition. Hawthorne used symbol and artifice in similar ways.
Over the course of its 350-some pages, The High Heaven strays far from southern New Mexico. And yet, part of its power derives from the ways in which the region remains present. A treatment that Izzy devises for moonlessness, for instance, involves positioning her moonless patients before old televisions, where they meditate on videos of the moon filmed from near wherever the patient’s childhood home was. In this way, Izzy and Teeter, who also happens to be from southern New Mexico, come to contemplate footage of the moon over SNM’s Sacramento Mountains—a “view of the moon from whatever genesis they’d fled.”
The moon over New Mexico: This image, imbued with Biblical resonance by the word “genesis,” caps off a chain of symbols that spans decades and narrative genres, linking outer space to American spirituality and present-day New Orleans to 1960s New Mexico. Since reading The High Heaven, I’ve found myself especially aware of the moon as it rises over my patch of New Mexico. In Wheeler’s telling, the moon embodies our ever-growing distance from the past and all the loss that that distance entails. As Izzy explains in one of her livestreams, the moon, “our lesser light,” was formed out of debris created by the collision of a planet with the early Earth. “Our lesser light shines as a beacon of the trauma that bore us,” Izzy says. “Now the moon is farther away, a quarter million miles, and inching further year after year as she slows down, further from the violence. From the beginning, I guess, we were always losing the moon.”
Jake Bartman’s short fiction has appeared in Story, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, Booth, and elsewhere. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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