The strength of this book lies in Conover's voice, confident, observant, nonjudgmental. He seems to find everyone interesting. Still, he recognizes 'the needy are not always the good' ... The book's structure doesn't follow a strict chronology, nor does it follow one main character; readers expecting a traditional nonfiction narrative might be slightly at sea, at first. While the arc of the book is roughly chronological, the chapters are thematic.
Shaggy but engrossing ... The bulk of the book consists of discursive anecdotes about the people Conover met and often befriended ... One of Conover’s strengths as a writer is that he is willing to let his subjects 'say their piece.' He is wonderfully open to people’s understanding of themselves, even when he sees the world very differently ... Indeed, Conover seems reluctant to judge or theorize much about what he saw and heard in the San Luis Valley. Some might see this paucity of analysis as a problem with Cheap Land Colorado, and Conover to some degree invites the criticism. Early on, he suggests he was drawn to the prairie to answer big questions following the election of Donald Trump ... If understanding recent political shifts and the American mainstream was his goal, Conover fails spectacularly. But was that really his aim? Excise a few grandiose mission statements from this eye-opening book, and nothing is lost — and nothing seems to be missing. With his thorough and compassionate reportage, Conover conjures a vivid, mysterious subculture populated by men and women with riveting stories to tell.
One of our great narrative journalists ... Conover’s approach isn’t so much about pinning people down as letting them reveal themselves. He’s such a wry and nimble writer that much of the time this works, yielding rounded portraits that are full of ambiguity, anguish and contradiction ... Sometimes, though, Conover is so empathetic that he seems determined to put the most generous gloss on what people tell him.
Another book-length study of rural America as a symbol of a fractured nation ... Conover suggests that his stint will offer him — and us — a window into Trump-era America ... His heart isn’t in the job, though. In many ways that’s a relief: Poor, weird, difficult, pretty, drug-sick and occasionally violent, the San Luis Valley is so far afield from urban or rural traditions that it’s not always identifiably American. Conover is wise not to boil his subjects down into types. But his reluctance also makes for a centerless, sometimes frustrating book that is uncertain about what kind of portrait of American life it means to present ... Once he’s earned some of the locals’ trust,...he finds a remarkable group of residents who are hard to stereotype ... Even if Conover means to avoid rote big-picture conclusions about the San Luis Valley — if he’s content to share stories about trying to set up a wind turbine or working a volunteer shift at a shelter — an immersive portrait of the area has a hard time emerging ... Specificity might make for a more conventional, perhaps blander feat of reportage. But without that context, Conover’s observations can feel unfinished or overly romanticized ... A fascinating portrait of individual residents. But as for a place that can teach us something about where America is going, that’s a different land entirely.
Conover keeps his readers waiting for too long, almost half the book, before saying anything about how the San Luis Valley came to be a magnet for the dispossessed ... Conover’s book is full of remarkable characters ... All of these people are fascinating, but none of them is the main character of the book. That role goes to Conover, who calls the second chapter 'My Prairie Life, Part I' and the third 'My Prairie Life, Part II.' The titles change after that, but the gist remains the same. As a writer, Conover is most at home in the first-person present tense; he prefers the closeup to the wide-angle shot, action to exposition, the immediate moment to context or history ... The virtue of this approach is that it brings the San Luis Valley into relief. Conover has a good eye for the particularity of life on the flats ... Still, all this immediacy comes at a cost, one I felt acutely throughout the book: off to the side of Conover’s own high beams, a great deal lies in darkness. The tens of thousands of other people living off the grid elsewhere in America are acknowledged in a single parenthetical aside, and the scope of rural poverty in this country goes entirely unmentioned. You would not know from Cheap Land Colorado that life in the San Luis Valley, presented here as extraordinary, looks a lot like life in countless other impoverished places. Nor does Conover pay much attention to the structural problems that have swept his characters out onto the flats, like so many Joads on the road. Although he wrote an entire book, Whiteout, about Aspen, which is a few hours away and has a median home price upward of three million dollars, we get no consideration of that town here, no sense that the lives of the rich have any bearing on those of the poor ... The cumulative effect of all this is that Cheap Land Colorado reads more like a travelogue...The San Luis Valley we encounter in the book exists mostly insofar as Conover is there exploring it; only occasionally do we see the place or its people without the writer in the frame. Sometimes this author-centric perspective serves the story well ... although consistently interesting to read, is hamstrung by the hovering presence of its author—not because Conover isn’t good company on the page but because his book never finds another focus. It is full of so many compelling people that he could have assembled a truly stellar ensemble cast—or, conversely, picked a few of them and stuck with them long enough to make their own prairie lives vivid, expansive, and illuminating. Instead, most of the characters wander in and out of the book without leaving much behind, except for the impression that potentially captivating stories have gone untold ... What makes this distractible style of storytelling particularly frustrating is that it is at odds with what Conover claims to do.
... an important book, shedding light on people who are often depicted as caricatures, if they are depicted at all. Mr. Conover’s love of the land and the society are genuine, but—and there’s no way to avoid this—life here is a counterpoint to his life in New York with his wife and career. That’s a luxury not available to the residents of the Valley.
Conover’s steady sympathy, his negative capability, lets us take in the culture of the flats on its own terms ... It must be said that his expansiveness sometimes devolves into rambling, and the book sprawls, as if it took its shape from the prairie. His evocations of the olden days give a golden cast to his characters, whose lives, like Pa’s, sound bleaker than Conover seems to want to acknowledge ... A reader may not be willing to go that deep, but she has to acknowledge the sincerity of Conover’s desire to join the ranks of American dreamers, for better or for worse.
Conover’s ability to depict all characters he encounters with grace and dignity shows a restraint that makes this a work to be devoured by readers from empty, forgotten places and beyond.
It is the coming and going to the valley, the building of lives, the breaking of lives that creates interest here ... Poverty is persistent throughout the book, and one thing Conover never really reconciles is his privilege. He comes and goes from the flats at will. He keeps a life in New York City. He roughs it for periods of time, but always his life is rooted in the city. His experience then is quite different from the people he meets who are much more yoked to the land ... The book does promise an exploration of off-grid living, but here there are some limits.
... sharp, balanced profiles ... With empathy, compassion, and skillful storytelling, Conover engagingly shares the dreams and realities of those he met and befriended, offering a window into a community that few readers will ever experience ... A captivating portrait of a community on the fringes.
... impressively detailed if somewhat diffuse ... Vivid biographical sketches fascinate, but several narrative threads are left hanging, including the tensions between the off-gridders and longtime Hispanic residents of the valley’s towns. Readers will wish this intriguing snapshot had a sharper focus.
