Monument

A Young Drifter’s Ascent from Prairie Tragedy to the Dark Rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. Monument is a novel of desperation and aspiration. George Gexler, a young German-American, flees high plains natural wonder and sudden tragedy in the lengthening shadow of the Great Depression, joining America’s nomadic homeless riding the rails with hope in the distance and mortal danger close at hand. On Mount Rushmore’s eastern face, he is with the genius sculptor Gutzom Borglum and the men jackhammering his vision of immortality for American democracy and his own artistic legacy. George finds love and literature in the stacks of the Rapid City, South Dakota Carnegie library and terror at the top of a grain elevator. His ease at great heights and his strength and steadiness in the face of adversity commend him to those of vision and take him ultimately to his parents’ homeland on an extraordinary assignment: pointing a handheld camera down into the rapture of the new Naziism of 1934. This is a story of the land and its hold on the imagination of artists, poets, and builders of monuments and those who serve them, of two American presidents and an extraordinary first lady, all coming to an empty place being made new. It is a story of two nations rising, of genius in the service of evil, and of redemption through American optimism and lovers’ pluck. The view is broad, from prairie horizon to vast zeppelin field.