Finally, the Climbing World Gets a Novel That Captures the Soul of Our Sport—and the Unforgiving Need to Be Great
When I first reached out to Gabriel Tallent to review his coming-of-age novel Crux, he warned me: “It’s not a very climbery climbing book. I’m not sure it’s worth your time.” Almost immediately, I understood Tallent’s hesitation. Crux, which will be released on January 20 from Riverhead Books (a Penguin imprint), is not a first-person account of cutting-edge ascents already survived. It’s the opposite: the story of two people trying to become climbers.
The book starts with two Southern California teenagers projecting a highball V4 boulder without a crashpad (they can’t afford one). Both 17 years old, Tamma is manic and hyper-enthusiastic, while Dan is a cerebral perfectionist. For the two best friends, climbing is no hobby, but a quest for the validation that they’re destined to one day make it as pros. Without family support, mentorship, or financial security, this search becomes a test of their willpower. Between stolen gear and sketchy landings, they climb to attain proof that they should drive out to Indian Creek and leave their families’ expectations behind.
“I don’t just want to go places, Dan. I want to be the best trad climber that has ever lived,” Tamma tells her friend in the second chapter. “The sendiest, thirstiest, baddest motherfucker in the history of motherfuckers. I want to be a legend. I want to send Cobra. I want to send Belly Full of Bad Berries and Century Crack.” (Same, girl, same.)
When her brother-in-law abandons his family, Tamma steps up to help raise her sister’s kids in a trailer. Soon after, Dan’s mother goes into heart surgery, and he spends long hours trying to understand his mom’s life and why she had such a disastrous falling out with her best friend, Tamma’s mom. Between their two difficult family situations, Tamma and Dan let loose their confessions and daydreams in outdoor climbing sessions. With no disposable income, they’re stuck bouldering padless outside Joshua Tree until Tamma finds someone’s ancient rack in a dumpster; after that, they have enough hexes and steel nuts to project one moderate trad climb at a time.
Climbers will find Tallent’s descriptions of Joshua Tree inspiring and melodious. “The heat seemed to come off the granite like a sound,” Tallent writes. He evocatively captures the pair’s sense of freedom in driving out there: “For all the fear, it was the greatest, most wide-open, most breaking-apart feeling in all the world.” Throughout the story, his characters’ meditations on courage are motivating and clear; near the end, they become downright transcendent.
Part of this is because Tallent is a seasoned trad climber himself. While Crux is the first book he’s written about climbing, he published his debut novel, My Absolute Darling, in 2017. This coming-of-age, survivalist story follows a 14-year-old girl trying to escape her father’s physical and sexual abuse on the coast of northern California, which is also where Tallent grew up. Now the 39-year-old author lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, and his Instagram account looks like a vision board for the type of life Dan and Tamma dream of living: desert towers, piles of gear, friends crowded around a roof crack. “I’d be extremely leery to write about climbing without climbing seriously,” he told PBS Utah in 2018, sitting with a pen and notebook at the base of a boulder near Salt Lake. Well-paced, authentic, and imbued with emotional depth, the climbing scenes in Crux offer a welcome break from the sloppy treatment of the sport that we’ve seen over and over in shows and films—not to mention the dearth of literary novels that center rock climbing in a credible way.
Some of Tallent’s affinity for dark topics bleeds through to Crux, notably in the nonstop, explicit sexual references that serve as the primary expression of Tamma’s confidence. “Climbing is about wrapping your hands around the grim reaper’s slopery skull and nutting deep into the jaws of death,” Tamma tells Dan during a pep talk. That’s the tone she carries throughout the story; as a reader, you get used to it. After she sends a boulder project, she declares “I am a goddess of sex and slab climbing,” as if they’re the same thing. Tallent makes it clear that Tamma is a masc lesbian and Dan is straight; their platonic friendship is both believable and genuinely heartwarming. Still, Tamma’s lesbian identity appears, at times, to be simply an excuse for Tallent to channel the dehumanizing vulgarity of a fifth-grade boy. Of pro boulderer Alex Puccio, Tamma raves: “Puccio is sending everything in a globe-trotting, jaw-dropping, panty-soaking orgy of sendage that will go down in history… And meanwhile, we’re stuck here, in Buttfuck, California, working this one chossy V4 nobody has heard of.” But by her tenth or twelfth reference to female climbers’ sex appeal, I found myself silently begging Tallent, and Tamma, to leave real people alone. I also wished the author would have leaned into other parts of the female climber experience—such as wishing your body weren’t objectified so much.
What redeems Tamma’s character is her loyalty, kindness, and courage to chase her dreams without anyone (except Dan) cheering her on. Day after day, she shows up for her sister—changing diapers, making food for the kids, and absorbing occasional verbal abuse from her mom. If you can read past her vulgarity and cringey sentences (e.g., “I saw Tommy Caldwell once and I kissed his hand.”), she’ll quickly become your favorite character, if only because she refuses to give up on herself.
Next to Tamma, Dan appears steady and grounded, but his chaos is simply quieter. As his senior year approaches its end, he wrestles with the decision of whether to go to college, like his parents want him to, or follow his passion for climbing by running away with Tamma to live off the grid and chase climbing glory. To find inspiration, he studies his mom’s life, reading the debut book that made her a famous writer, wondering if he can perform under pressure as she did. As Tamma expands her definitions of badassery, Dan slowly attempts to replicate his mom’s hyper-focus on a singular goal. If he can’t onsight a certain route, he decides, “he wasn’t ever going to be a climber anyway.”
It’s hard to describe just how visceral and real this book feels. Most rock climbing books today fall into the categories of memoirs or biographies, rendering what are usually emotionally muted versions of past high-risk or dangerous events. The knowledge of the subject’s survival often flatten the stakes. In Beyond the Mountain, for example, when Steve House falls into a crevasse in the French Alps and needs to climb back out ropeless with one mountaineering ax and a broken leg, we know he makes it out because he obviously lived to write the story. Any sense of real fear requires readers to temporarily forget what we are reading—and yes, with good writing, that’s often possible.
But Tallent’s novel makes no such guarantees that everything will be okay. All we have to hint at the fate of the characters is the back cover blurb and any spoilers we’ve accidentally stumbled upon in reviews such as this. And the author quickly proves he is not afraid to maim—or even kill—his characters if they fall in the wrong spot. Suddenly, the runouts feel longer. Their blown-out shoes feel more slippery. When Tamma and Dan notice a coreshot in their rope, it invokes a low-level panic in our chests that persists until they’re back on the ground. With its unpredictability, the story that unfolds across 405 pages felt closer to recreating the literal experience of climbing than any other “climbery climbing” book I’ve read.
Through brilliant internal monologue and character development that catches you by surprise, Tallent’s protagonists eventually reach a powerful understanding of what the soul of climbing is and who gets to claim it. What lingers most after finishing Crux is its all-consuming sense of desperate ambition—the pressure that some beginner climbers feel about the perceived zero-sum choice between surrendering their souls to a capitalist routine or rocketing into the adventurous life of a dirtbag. Trust me, I’ve been there.
Yet from my own (albeit brief) experience as a full-time dirtbag, I know now that this struggle represents a false dichotomy. Many elite climbers steadily build up their skills over years, sometimes while still holding real jobs or finding other ways to monetize their passion—for example, by working in the outdoor industry. Adventure can be piecemeal and seasonal; it’s not an all-or-nothing game. But just like anyone who is new to the sport, Tamma and Dan don’t know that yet. They sense only the air beneath their feet.
Crux by Gabriel Tallent will be available for purchase on January 20, 2026.
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