Broken: A Love Story (review)

Stanford Addison is a Northern Arapaho healer and horse-gentler, a man whose devastating car crash at twenty robbed him of his physical independence at the same time that it awakened unusual spiritual powers. Lisa Jones is a journalist with an open but pragmatic mind, a self-described terror of horses, and a willingness to follow a story wherever it might lead. Broken: A Love Story is the culmination of the years Jones spent visiting Addison and his large extended family in Wyoming, and it is a vivid, engaging, often very funny, fiercely honest portrayal of an extraordinary man by a woman who refuses to shy away from her subject's depths and contradictions.

Or from her own. As revealing a portrait as it provides of Addison, Broken is also an intensely personal narrative. As Jones listens to Addison's stories, watches him perform extraordinary feats from his wheelchair, and becomes close to his sister and mother and nephews and friends, she grows in her own awareness of what it means to be a spirit in a body, a person in the world, and a woman in love. Gun-shy from years of mixed success in relationships, she arrives at Addison's horse corral on the Wind River Indian Reservation as skittish about commitment as the wild horses are about their sudden confinement.

In a thousand ways, Jones learns from Addison the difficult lesson he has taught the terrified horses: "The only way to endure confinement is to accept it. Stanford called it 'finding your center'" (7). This man, quadriplegic and beset by pressure sores that routinely turn septic and threaten his life, ministers to anyone in need. He offers his help without compensation or regard for the toll it takes on him. And the toll is great. "I had never seen bad luck heaped so hugely upon a human body," Jones writes, describing her first meeting with Addison. "He looked at me, his gaze mild, open, alert, and unblinking. It walloped me just the way beauty would" (5).

In prose that is agile, intimate, and unfailingly accurate, Jones describes her own reaction to the material poverty and physical violence that surround Addison and his family. A perceptive guide, she backs up to fill the reader in on the brutal history the tribe endured at the hands of white soldiers and government agencies in the nineteenth century and the oppressive conditions that persist today. Just as precisely, she leads the reader to understand the spiritual wealth and depth of love that characterize a people for whom personal relations and a connection to the natural world are sacred and powerful.

A white woman. A Native American medicine man. A love story set on the weather-whipped open landscape of Wyoming's Wind River Range. The stereotypes are ripe and dangerous. Jones navigates those treacherous currents with a self-deprecating wit, a journalist's trained and skeptical eye, and a very canny awareness of the mythos she must successfully skirt to get to the heart of the matter. The love story? It's not Jones and Addison, at least not in a romantic sense. It's all of them, in it together. It's a hymn to love in a broken world, among broken bodies and damaged spirits and torn communities, and it is leavened with humor and a compassion Jones ultimately learns to extend, with most difficulty, to herself.