Summer Reading Picks - Westerns

 I just  finished my first summer reading, Ivan Doig's memoir, This House of Sky, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1979. Doig grew up in small-town Montana with his widowed father in the 40s and 50s, bouncing around from ranch to ranch in the areas around White Sulphur Springs and Dupuyer. 

Beautifully written, it vividly describes the lives of hardworking sheepherders, cowboys, and ranchers who battled a hard land, but mostly it chronicles the life of his father and intrepid grandmother, who held together family life after the death of his young mother. Doig gently picks apart the threads of his earliest memories and pieces them together with stories he heard from his family, to recreate a moving portrait of a time and a landscape that he left for a different kind of life.

I've read one other Doig book, The Whistling Season, a novel that evokes some of the same gentle nostalgia as his memoir. I've been thinking of my own fascination with the history of the West and the books that have informed and inspired it. These aren't "genre" Westerns (although I've read some Louis L'amour and Zane Grey along the way). If you're looking for summer reading with a Western flavor, here are some of my favorites in no particular order.

• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMutry - It actually took me awhile to get to this one, but it seems too obvious to leave off. My husband would say these cowboys talked way too much about their "feelings" (based only on the TV interpretation), but it's a classic for a reason. An epic tale of the west with a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, the tangled lives of cowboys and the women they love, a man in search of his runaway wife, and a prostitute with a heart of gold.
• The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe - This Canadian writer probably flies way too far under the radar. These stellar novels are part of a loose trilogy set mostly along the Montana and Canadian border. The first one follows a boy's dark adventures among wolf hunters and horse thieves in 1870s Montana, and stretches to 1920s Hollywood where a screenwriter has tracked down the old man to tell his story for a film. The second is a post-Civil War tale of two English brothers who travel to Montana to search for their youngest brother, who has disappeared into the wilderness. They are part of a motley crew traveling on various missions of their own, including a woman who is trying to avenge her sister by tracking down the suspected murderer. Vanderhaeghe died in 2012 but not before finishing the third in this set, A Good Man, which I hope to read soon.
• Little Big Man by Thomas Berger - This novel was the basis for the Dustin Hoffman movie, but you should read the book. It's as funny a story as can be that begins with a young boy's family being massacred by Indians. Endlessly entertaining, Jack/Little Big Man's adventures among Indians, the U.S. Calvary, gunfighters, and outlaws is irreverent and epic in scope. He claims to be the only white survivor of Little Bighorn.
• The Son by Philipp Meyer - Another novel that begins with a white boy's family being massacred and himself taken into captivity by the Comanche. It couldn't be more different. Viscerally detailed, it chronicles the history of a Texas family from the 1800s through 2012. I wrote a lengthier review here of this brilliant novel.
• The Border Trilogy, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - I wandered into McCarthy when I read the first of the trilogy, All The Pretty Horses. Since then I've read nearly all of McCarthy's work from his early dark and twisty Appalachian novels to his Western masterpieces, including the gorgeous, mythic, and hair-raising Blood Meridian, which I'm contemplating reading again this summer. Because it's awesome.
• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather - Cather is another of those writers I've read extensively. She's masterful in writing about the lives of prairie people, particularly women, but this historical novel is set in the desert southwest, mostly New Mexico. It tells the story of the Catholic priests who started the Spanish missions among the native Americans. It's cast of characters includes Kit Carson and many other rascals and cheats.
• Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson - I loved this novel of 1980s Montana -- a gripping story about a very flawed, but also admirable man, who tries to save people as a social worker, but can't control his own broken personal life, his runaway daughter, or a young kid on the lam with his fugitive father.
• White Crosses by Larry Watson - Yet another story set in Montana on the border near Alberta. A contemporary tale of scandal in a small town, featuring a mystery, a protagonist with dubious motivations, and a wonderfully complex and textured writing style. 

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather is one of my favorite writers. I forget how beautiful her writing is in between books, and it always delights me when I rediscover it. This one has definitely spurred my interest in the history of New Mexico and the clashing of Spanish, native, and American cultures. I find myself thinking of Cormac McCarthy and his perspective on these "clashes" in Blood Meridian. Obviously, he renders the violence in much more gut-wrenching terms than Cather does, and she actually finds humane and genuinely good men -- Father Latour, Father Vaillant, the young Indian Jacinto, and Kit Carson -- among the killers, rascals, and cheats. One thing these writers do have in common is their ability to evoke the natural beauty, mystery, and majesty of the southwestern landscape. I'm just a bit over half way through, but it's such a wonderful book to enter into autumn with.

I think next may be James Salter, and I'm also planning to read The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, considered to be one of the greatest Italian novels.

Literary news: Glad and sad

Cormac McCarthy won the U.K."s James Tait Black memorial prize for The Road. The Guardian article indicates, too, that he is being mentioned as a Nobel contender. I'd like to see that -- it would be very well-deserved for his entire body of work, which is impressive, to say the least.

I also read the obituary for literary scholar Julia Briggs, who was only in her 60s and died of a brain tumor. I read her study of Virginia Woolf and loved it. She was married to the historian Robin Briggs, which I did not know. It's very tragic. When one of your favorite writers dies, it is a loss -- even though you don't know them personally, you feel you know them just a little through their work; and of course, you do lose the gift of the writing that they would have done.

The Road

I read the The Road by Cormac McCarthy just recently and I was stunned by how beautiful it was, despite the fact that it's about a blasted America in the midst of nuclear winter. His writing has always had the apocalyptic element and he has finally served up the Apocalypse directly. I wonder what else he has in mind, because I can't help feeling that this is the novel toward which all of his previous fiction has been headed. It even ends with a sliver of hope. It seems like a farewell, a very stark benediction, though I hope that's not the case. It's a novel you keep thinking about. I loaned it to friends and look forward to talking to them about it too.

And speaking of the road, we've been traveling recently. In Birmingham, we saw Eric Clapton last weekend. He was great, but he seemed more the elder statesman generously pushing forward two youngsters in his band, both very fine guitarists. Why does everyone seem to be performing their farewells these days? Perhaps it's a sign of the times. Having been bombarded with the combined idiocy of election ads for weeks now, it does sometimes seem like the End of the World is upon us. It's as if all the stupidest and lamest people in the country were suddenly interested in governing. Oh, dear, I just broke my own rule in only writing about "what makes the world a better place," which would explain the long gaps between posts.

Moving right along...I'm currently reading my first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans. I'm about half way in and realizing my narrator is very unreliable, which is always fun. It also has an old-fashioned Wilkie Collins thing going on.

Last, but not least, hubby and I have front row seats for Barenaked Ladies in Columbus. We're very excited, and I'm also looking forward to checking out the wine/food scene there since we're going up for the weekend. The new BNL has a nice, easy vibe to it. It doesn't seem as thematic as some of the other albums, particularly Maroon, in which all the songs seem to hang together like a collection of short stories. But because of the way it's been released, I don't think it is intended to be otherwise. I particularly like "Home" and "Peterborough and the Kawarthas," which is lovely. "Wind It Up" is the best song no one is playing on the radio. Oh, well. Radio is so ten-minutes-ago.

Late summer novels, music, and distractions

I've mostly worked through my obsession with the fall fashion magazines--particularly Vogue. I always feel like I'm indulging a particularly guilty pleasure. Why do I pore over shoe styles and skirt lengths and goofy trends? I think it must be the fun of observing a world that I SO do not inhabit (the same reason I'm attracted to military history and battlefield accounts? That's a weird parallel). I wish all I had to worry about was the chagrin of being caught out in last year's Prada. Horrors!

I have managed to read through a spate of novels while pondering the bubble skirt and patterned tights. I went back and read Cormac McCarthy's first novel as I await the new one coming later in the month. The Orchard Keeper belongs to his early set of novels, all set in the hills and towns of East Tennessee. He has been remarkably consistent in his style and themes from the very beginning. He has a great gift for dialect and manages to capture the subtle features of language that convey both the humor and the menace hovering under the surface of everyday speech. I think he is unparalleled in writing about the natural world and the life of animals. His descriptions are detailed and transcendent at the same time. There's always the lurid streak and the unthinking violence--man's destructive and greedy spirit aimed at both nature and other men. He is, therefore, always relevant, always instructive, and can't help being prophetic.

A good, old-fashioned novel is Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire set in occupation-era Japan. Hazzard worked for British Intelligence (she's an Australian by birth) in China during WWII, so she knows whereof she speaks in this story of a couple of war-scarred veterans, both involved in post-war duties and still dealing with the trauma of their service. One of them finds healing in the relationship he develops with a much younger woman (girl, really), but he's so gosh-darned honorable the situation is robbed of creepiness. I guess that's the old-fashioned part--the love story, the idealized young woman and her terminally ill brother. Also a little creepy is the fact that the protagonist and his famous-author father shared the same mistress (though not at the same time). Well, all of this sounds a bit pot-boilerish, but Hazzard's writing is so elegant and restrained, and her concerns so solemn, that the effect is more Laurence Durrell than Harold Robbins.

I just finished Monica Ali's Brick Lane. I thought it was well-written and an interesting look at immigrant London. Of course, as a novel about Muslims and identity in Britain in the post 9/11 world, it is intriguing apart from literary merit. They are already filming it and it's creating another round of hoopla from the residents of the real Brick Lane, some of whom find it racist and derogatory. My favorite quote from the protest faction spokesman is "It's not fiction--it's lies." Right. Hmmmm... That bit would be right at home in Ali's book!

Last, but not least, I saw Bruce Cockburn recently in concert. He was wonderfully soothing somehow--soothing in the way of people who are at least mad about the same things that you are and can articulate it in a finely crafted song--another of those voices crying out in the wilderness. Effortless-seeming guitar playing and good musicians playing with him.

Cormac McCarthy is scary...and pissed

Actually I love Cormac McCarthy. I visited the CM Forum and saw a post from a new reader who had just finished the Border Trilogy and wanted to read more of him--something more "uplifting." Little does she know those were the uplifting ones! Yikes. She doesn't need to go anywhere near Blood Meridian. Which brings me to No Country for Old Men, which I just finished. The body count is high, though it still can't compare to BM for that. It's set in the early 80s by my counting, on the border between Texas and Mexico, ground zero for the violence and mayhem of cross-border drug running. Llewelyn Moss is out antelope hunting and stumbles across a scene of a drug deal gone very, very bad--everyone dead and dying. He skips the heroin payload but takes the bag full of money and, as McCarthy would put it, skedaddles. He doesn't skedaddle very well and is soon the prey of the law, an ex-Special Forces assassin, and someone else, very like the Devil himself, named Anton Chigurgh (a character in the novel mistakes the name for "sugar," which must be a McCarthy joke; it makes me think of "chiggers"--the little buggers that burrow into your skin and make you itch like mad).

It moves along at a great clip--reviewers seem convinced that it is an action film in the making, and I can kind of see it as a Tarantino movie, if you excise the very thing that McCarthy is most intent on presenting. He intersplices all the bloodletting with the voice of the aging county sheriff, not so much involved in the action, as the sad, helpless witness who tells his story in counterpoint to the brutal action surrounding him. He looks backward to the past, and doesn't see the romantic pioneering of his grandparents and their parents, but the beginnning of the end, which he seems fairly sure is just around the next bend. With McCarthy, there is no romantic Western myth outside of the rough, beautiful landscape itself, which is always the subject of his most beautiful prose. For all things human, his perspective is apocalyptic. The forces of good and the forces of evil are always in battle and the side of good is not exactly winning. In this novel, which I probably need to re-read and think over some more, there is little or no redemption--not for the characters, not for the country, and perhaps nowhere in the world. Not too uplifting, eh?

As for Chigurgh, he is truly chilling. He operates more like a killing machine (and in fact his weapon of choice IS a machine), following his own murderous logic. He seems a little otherworldly, a kind of Destroyer Angel (what's with me and all the Angels of Death??)--a really pitiless Fate, who twice in the novel allows his victims to call a coin toss to see whether they live or die. It's that bit of indifference in him that makes him frightening. He isn't just a psychopath who can't keep himself from killing--he just does. Another image that comes to me is the Basilisk--I haven't seen anyone else mention it, but it seems like a linkage that CM would have in mind, being that he so often dwells in the realms of the allegorical and the mystical.

There is a political undercurrent to the novel. The Sheriff's ruminations touch on just about every Red State/Blue State debate there is: drug crime, the death penalty, abortion, euthanasia, the Vietnam War, the fortunes of corporations and what those fortunes are buying (us?). The really radical idea here is that the downward spiral is not the fault of any party, or a single event like Vietnam. Following McCarthy's logic, thinking of what he's written before, the root of the evil goes at least as far back as the first forays of Europeans on this continent. Not an "unclaimed" continent, but one already claimed and peopled, and therefore setting in motion a long, violent war which is not over. Manifest Destiny means subjugating humans and the environment, and in the wake of that march of destiny is all the bloodshed and destruction that make up the body of McCarthy's work.