The action of this novel takes place in the West, but it is not a "Western"; and though its central focus is the life of Adaline Carson, daughter of the famed frontiersman Kit Carson, it is also not a biography. Set in the time of the California gold rush, it is a detailed and graphic elegy for America's wide-open plains, rivers, and mountains and the people who lived in and passed through them, for both good and ill. The Appointment is...