Looking for Mo - Hardcover

After charting his travels up High Sierran peaks and through the pipelines of Santa Cruz surf culture, Daniel Duane embarks on an adventurous new course with the novel Looking for Mo. This charming update of The Dharma Bums (minus the idealism) brings together an assortment of shaggy, recognizable characters who play out a late-20th-century California pastoral involving friendship, love, betrayal, and the redemptive qualities of the great outdoors. The action moves from San Francisco to the mountains, from "cedar-paneled sushi bars" to psilocybin-fueled Dead shows--with Yosemite continually beckoning in the background. Protagonist Ray Connelly, barely self-sufficient and scrounging around the Bay Area, is on the verge of serious romance when his old doppelganger Mo pops up, a drifter-climber who happens to have an enviable knack for storytelling. Enviable to Ray, that is. Since their last adventures, Ray has been borrowing generously from his friend's oral history and shopping around a collection of stories. When Mo discovers the theft, there's trouble. What better way to hash out their differences than getting back on El Capitan, the climber's mecca that foiled them in the past?

Once on the piton-scarred face of El Cap, Ray must come to grips with himself as much as with Mo, a task as daunting as the monolithic rock itself. "This was it--the inevitable moment between us, when Mo was willing to risk everything and when a voice inside me insisted that nothing was worth death. I absolutely ached to let go, to be as confident and careless as Mo, but I couldn't. I didn't want to tempt fate that way--I wanted the risks to be no more than the ones I'd signed up for." Though some readers might be put off by the dude-itude of the characters and their exploits, fans of outdoorsy literature (not to mention observers of California Nation) will thoroughly enjoy this scenic rappel into an American subculture. --Langdon Cook

Daniel Duane is the author of Lighting Out: A Vision of California and the Mountains and Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Men's Journal, Outside, GQ, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The Village Voice. He lives in San Francisco.