"Little Century," a Novel by Anna Keesey There are staples we've come to expect in the American frontier novel: unlikely homesteaders, stoic farmhands and scheming railroad men; unchecked ambitions, mysterious pasts and vigilante justice. Winter always seems to be looming. Or summer. Somebody will probably divulge a secret to a horse or a child. Mishandled, these western standbys can seem like threadbare, dime-­novel clichés. Handled deftly, these conventions are the stuff of American myth. The line is finer than one might think. While Anna Keesey's first novel, "Little Century," may walk a well-worn path, the familiar is rendered vividly through fluid and restrained prose, solid plotting and a keen eye for detail. The little town of Century is trying to eke out a living in the high desert of eastern Oregon when 18-year-old Esther Chambers arrives in the fledgling outpost, an orphan in search of her only known relative - a distant cousin named Ferris Pickett. Esther soon learns that Pick, a cattleman, is Century's major benefactor and chief citizen. As the story opens, he's lobbying for the railroad to bring a freight line through Century, which he hopes will improve the town's fortunes along with his own. Pick, at once charismatic and controlling, is perhaps the novel's most fascinating character, because his considerable moral contradictions and questionable motives are convincingly ambiguous. Pick enlists Esther, under false pretenses, to help him take control of the town's major water supply for livestock. He persuades her to file a claim (illegally) on Half-a-Mind, a playa lake on the edge of town. Grazing land and watering holes mean everything in this parched region, where cattlemen and shepherds compete - not so peacefully, it seems. In fact, Esther quickly recognizes that in spite of what appears to be an abundance of land, there's a range war going on. And her little homestead is the battlefield. "Little Century" is packed with distinctive personalities, some of whom you might recognize - the eccentric and endearingly Dickensian shop owner, the distinguished reverend, the cold-­blooded villain, the stubbornly independent schoolteacher and the long-­suffering horse (named, in this case, for the Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway). Keesey, a graduate of the Iowa Writers" Workshop, treads this familiar territory competently, imbuing her characters with palpable motives, rich contradictions and fully realized pasts. She also stays atop the rising action of the story, upping the stakes for her characters and the town of Century as she herds us efficiently toward the conclusion. At the same time, she knows not to hurry readers along without letting them soak up the atmosphere. The real star of the novel is Oregon's high desert, a vast, quiet plain Keesey captures in many of its dynamic moods, in language ranging from the plain­spoken to the elegant. Esther observes the lay of the land after arriving: "As far as she might walk to, or even see, to one side or the other, all is gray and sleeping under a shiver-thin coverlet of old snow." And like all well-wrought settings, Keesey's high desert has woven itself into the fabric of its inhabitants, as it has for Pick: "He remembered, always, the desert of his childhood. The vast quiet, the singular negotiations between a cold, calm man and a colder, calmer plain. This ever-present landscape, flat, serene and seemingly endless, makes for an uncluttered backdrop, serving the action well while not distracting with its grandeur. The same could be said of Keesey's writing. Save for an occasional lyric flourish, her language serves the story admirably, rarely crossing the line into the self-­conscious, the sentimental or the flashy. In short, Keesey is a sentence writer in control of her craft. She's a storyteller who stays out of her own way. She's not one to frustrate traditional narrative structures. "Little Century" is clearly a novel of incident, in which one action leads to a greater reaction, escalating decisively as the final, inevitable conflict draws nearer. Here, greed and grudge take their place at center stage, while humanity's better instincts whisper and bite their cuticles on the sideline, helpless to mount much of a defense. Jonathan Evison's latest novel, "The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving," will be published in August.