‘Crux’ is a ferocious, poetic look at two teens drawn to danger

Gabriel Tallent’s breakout 2017 debut novel, “My Absolute Darling,” told the difficult, ferocious story of an outlier father’s survivalist indoctrination and sexual abuse of his 14-year-old daughter — and her struggle to save herself. (Critical reception was respectful, if pained.)

His new novel, “Crux,” may qualify as a hybrid fruit tumbling not far from the “Darling” tree. It, too, is difficult and ferocious, if easier to ingest. Pushing through these pages — echoing its characters’ ordeals — requires resolve and stamina, but certain rewards abide.

Set in the southern Mojave Desert, “Crux” tracks the ironclad friendship of teenagers Dan and Tamma, their natures antithetical but both caught in miserable familial and economic straits. Both have long been obsessed with the art — and addiction — of rock climbing. It matters nothing if you’ve never known or cared about climbing: “Crux” will teach you, in hair-on-fire language.

In Dan and Tamma, Tallent has sculpted two passionate, disparate characters almost fused together in a (literal) do-or-die bond. It’s not sexual; Tamma is gay. Dan — son of an ailing mother who was once a rock-star-famous novelist — is quiet, introverted, mutely self-punishing in classic adolescent confusion. Tamma, whose grimly dysfunctional family lives in a trailer, has endured so much abuse and rejection she’s mustered a fierce, rubber-band-like persona that snaps back in defiance. Skinny, grungy, wildly tough, she trusts only Dan. Both seem preternaturally gifted and often speak like doctoral candidates — but in discourse also larded with climber-lore and unprintable epithets.

Rants like this form major chunks of “Crux” as Tamma and Dan assault their next ridiculously dangerous climb. In phrases like “strip malls and sadness” and “electric with yearning,” Tallent’s project strides forward with poetic guns blazing: Two smart, lonely, vulnerable 17-year-olds dangle unprotected in an indifferent, garbage-strewn society, trying to figure it out.

“Crux” is huge, ungainly and almost insanely bighearted. It could have used pruning, but so much of its writing is monster-audacious you forgive that. Dan mulls Tamma: “This girl: graceless, frolicsome, and indestructible, like you’d imagine a newborn moose … Her hope was a thing you could feel. It was a fire in the dark, breathing with the flaring open of her ribs.” This same girl sorts Dan’s books “by who would win a fight. Emily Bronte and Marcel Proust. Whitman and Melville.”

Later, though, a horrified Dan grasps their starkly different circumstances. Whereas he’s merely “hoping to escape a mild feeling of aimlessness,” Tamma is fighting for her life. “Invisible to him had been a divide of class, privilege, and opportunity,” Tallent writes. “The world lay before him as a butchery.”

Both kids attend high school grudgingly, “full of the feeling that life was somewhere, elsewhere.” The two long to triumph as rogue climbers — but they’ve no money for equipment or a car to travel to competitions. They constantly fear — with graphic reason — falling to their deaths. But, Tamma lectures, “This is our destiny, dude, and if you wimp out on it, you will always regret it. You’ll never, ever be happy going that scared, safe way your parents want you to go.”

Dan’s mother, suffering a near-crippling heart condition, dwells in bitterness for failing to follow up on her one-hit-wonder of a novel. Tamma’s domestic catastrophes include a cruel mother, her dope-dealer boyfriend, an overworked sister and her helpless children. Recruited to babysit, Tamma’s life becomes one of all-night child care and all-day climbing. What could possibly go wrong?

Mighty swaths of “Crux” detail the harsh beauties, terrifying agonies and (rarer) ecstasies of climbing: “a coming-back-alive sort of feeling.” But is there more to it? “Some people thought that climbers were dim-witted adrenaline junkies who did not understand consequences,” Dan thinks. But for people like Tamma, who “had nothing,” climbing’s stakes soared far higher: “it was an enormous psychological labor to keep … belief alive.” Yet “Crux’s” underlying vision — that navigating pain refines courage and spirit — is what prevails, recalling an Arthurian, Excalibur ethos.

Getting there’s seldom boring. But there will be blood.