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. 

My year in books: 2013

As an English lit major, a bookseller, a writer, and an editor, I've spent my entire life among books. I occasionally see the dismal statistics on how little the general populace reads, a figure that continues to plummet. It baffles my understanding -- right up there with string theory, reality TV, and wine spritzers. I'm thankful to have been born into a vanishing community of readers, even before my education and professional life propelled me into it.

Maybe my family's reading mania was due to growing up in a rural area where opportunities for cheap entertainment weren't that numerous. Our tastes were catholic -- mouse-nibbled copies of Shakespeare lay cheek by jowl with Harlequin romances and Hardy Boys mysteries. We had those old books of fairy tales -- the most dark and twisted kind with terrifying illustrations. My early grounding in stories of witches tossing little kids into the fire and ogres grinding up the bones of other unfortunates prepared me for the grown-up horrors of George Orwell and Cormac McCarthy.

The foregoing is a long-winded explanation of what feels like an extremely old-fashioned thing to do: a retrospective of books read in the previous year. It's not exhaustive, but I'll mention some of the notable ones, which I would recommend to others.

While immersed in 19th century literature, I read the biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne by James Mellow and re-read Moby Dick. A novel that neatly fell into the midst of these interests was Joyce Carol Oates' The Accursed. A sprawling, Hawthorne-haunted tale of ghosts and demons in turn of the century New Jersey, Oates packed in maybe one too many plot threads, but overall the story was a fascinating mix of purely fictional and historic characters crossing paths during Woodrow Wilson's tenure as president of Princeton. The spine of the novel concerns an old New England family, the Slades, and the curse that afflicts them. Spooky weddings, murders, vampires, and all manner of supernatural disasters lie in wait for the unhappy Slades. If you can manage the layered plots (some more successful than others), you'll encounter not only Wilson, but Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, Jack London, and Grover Cleveland.

My "summer vacation" book had to wait until an October beach trip, but I picked a perfect one. Pure by Andrew Miller offers a slice of pre-revolutionary French history. A young engineer is handed the dubious challenge of "purifying" and dismantling the Cemetery of Les Innocents, a centuries-old burial ground in Paris (later the site of Les Halles market). The cemetery's walls are disintegrating, the charnel pits literally overflowing into the surrounding city, and in the interest of public health, Jean-Baptiste Baratte must direct the digging up of the bodies and their removal in the face of a disapproving public and a half-mad priest who still inhabits the derelict church that stands on the grounds. If your benchmark for good historical fiction is Hilary Mantel, then you won't be disappointed with Miller's richly detailed world and its cast of colorful characters, including, again, both the historical and the imagined.

Keeping with my theme of classic American literature, I read Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood and then got caught up in the collection of her letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald, Habit of Being. The letters are a revelation, if you are an O'Connor fan. The sharp-edged humor is expected, but the thoughtful explanation of her Catholic faith and stoic attitude to her declining health are truly engaging. It is also a wonderful testament to the craft of writing, which she never tried to disguise as anything other than a discipline that required sustained work and attention, and the confidence to insist on her own unique vision. She greatly valued the input of trusted editors, but stood firm when it came down to preserving the integrity of her original ideas. Her letters are instructive and inspirational for any would-be writer.

I ended the year very neatly where  I started out -- back in New England with one  of America's most influential and original poets, Emily Dickinson. Her biographer, Alfred Habegger, borrows the subtitle from a line of one of her poems, "My wars are laid away in books." I feel much better prepared to return to the poetry itself after getting a better idea of the formative relationships and significant events of her life. Habegger relies on more recent scholarship, original sources, and a clear-eyed interpretation of the many gaps and vague clues that remain from her life. While he punctures the myth of the white-clad hermit of Amherst, there still remains the essential, alluring mystery of Emily Dickinson's power as a writer -- a  great feat of scholarship and writing.

And in the dwindling days of the year, I returned to one of my favorite settings in American lit, the Old West. Going old school, I read Elmore Leonard's Hombre, the basis for the movie with Paul Newman. It's a classic Western, featuring Leonard's signature stripped-down prose and heroes who don't quite fit the standard heroic mode. Oh, just read it; it only takes a few hours!

My very last entry for the year took a bit longer, but is a great American novel. Thomas Berger's Little Big Man deserves a wider readership than it is probably getting these days. I suspect that it has been pegged as merely "Western" genre fiction, but it is far more than that. Narrated by it's 111-year-old narrator, it is the picaresque adventures of Jack Crabbe, kidnapped by the Cheyenne at age 10, he claims to be the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn, and in between, meets iconic Western figures -- Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, and Custer himself. It is immediately engaging, humorous, moving and will make you think deeply about America's history with Native Americans. Published in 1964, it is the basis for the movie with Dustin Hoffman. It was especially interesting to me, having read this year's acclaimed novel, The Son, by Philipp Meyer. The protagonist's experience as a young boy, kidnapped by the Comanche in 1846, closely resembles that of old Jack Crabbe, but the two novels are as different as night and day in general tone and narrative style.

These are the books that most affected me in 2013, and I haven't quite decided how to begin 2014. I'm eager to get to Donna Tartt's Goldfinch, but there are always tremendous back logs of books that I've neglected.

What books do you have in mind for the new year? Tackling the classics or catching up with what's new?

Manifest Destiny, Philipp Meyer, and the way the West was won

New Mexico butte (Public Domain)

I've always loved a good Western. My brothers and I would stay up late on Saturday nights to watch John Wayne movies and after school, it was often Bonanza, Gun Smoke, and even The Big Valley, where the hair was teased and all the women were impossibly fashionable. From My Darling Clementine to Unforgiven and Deadwood, I'm still stuck on the genre. As a kid, who doesn't romanticize the cowboys and Indians, the non-stop action of shootouts, and galloping horses across vast plains? All that messy American history hasn't yet dimmed the glory of the Wild West.

Of course, a more sophisticated understanding of the history of settling the west brings with it all sorts of moral conundrums, and the best of the Western genre, whether in film or books, gets the deep ambivalence at the heart of it. The lines between "bad" guys and "good" guys blur; one minute you're cheering for the intrepid pioneers circling their wagons and the next, you're admiring the courage of the Sioux or Apache warriors attacking the wagons. It's the heyday of the anti-hero: Billy the Kid and Jesse James sticking it to the Man. Occupy Dodge City!

Dodge City Peace Commissioners: Wyatt Earp, front center (Public Domain)

At some point ambivalence turns to downright disillusion. Wounded Knee, Powder River, and Border Wars pile up the bodies on the ever-expanding frontier in the history books. Rivers of blood and displacement accompany the march westward, and yet the fascination lingers. The very lostness of the myth compels the imagination, a sad enchantment takes over. You start with Wyatt Earp and are left with the hideous Judge Holden in McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

All that was taken belonged to someone else first. And that is what brings me to Philipp Meyer's newest novel, The Son. It is an oft-repeated phrase in the lives of three generations of the McCullough family of Texas, whose history spans a period from the 1800s through 2012. The first McCullough we hear from is the formidable Eli, known as The Colonel, his story set as a WPA recording in 1936. Occupying a homestead beyond the settlement line in 1846 near Pedernales, thirteen-year-old Eli recounts the brutal murders of his family by raiding Comanches while his father is absent. He is kidnapped and taken west by the Comanche band, giving us the most thrilling parts of the novel. After his slow assimilation into the tribe and eventual return to his white roots, Eli builds the McCullough holdings, section by section, and passes it to his ancestors.

The story then alternates between Eli's remembrances, his son Peter's journals, and a great-granddaughter, Jeannie, who brings us into the present day. Along the way, history unfolds from the final surrender of the great Comanche Chief Quanah Parker, through the Border Wars with Mexico and two world wars, to the age of the oil barons.

Meyer's novel is masterful, an old-style epic of an American family that confronts the moral quagmire of what Manifest Destiny really entails -- wiping out all that is "other" in the quest to remake a continent into an American ideal. It's a story of decline and fall in the Edward Gibbon line: of a family, of the Native Americans, of Mexican territorial ambitions, and of the land itself, stripped and denuded, first for cattle and then for oil.

What keeps the novel from becoming a strident and oversimplified critique of evil American empire-building is that the characters themselves mourn the losses that will bring them ever greater wealth and power, a quintessentially American dilemma. Eli grieves more for his Comanche family than his white one, misses the empty plains and thigh-high grasses of his boyhood. For Peter, the debilitating guilt that springs from his family's raid on their Mexican neighbors blights his life; even the hard-nosed Jeannie mourns the disappearance of the old ranching lifestyle that makes possible her oil fortune and hard-won entry into the male-dominated world of business. Everything is bought at a price and sometimes the price makes all the rest, if not quite worthless, terribly fractured.

On the craftsman's level, Meyer's meticulous detailing of the Comanche lifestyle through the voice of Eli often reminded me of Melville's descriptions of the whaling life in Moby Dick. Eli takes the reader through the process of killing the buffalo -- in what manner the animal was dispatched, who performed the various tasks of disassembly, who was allowed the chief delicacies, and the further uses of each and every part in stomach-churning specificity. Similarly, the making of lariats, bows and arrows, and tipis is lovingly rendered -- all the more lovely because even in Eli's days, these things become meaningless anachronisms.

Meyer's writing is very finely nuanced; he balances the weight of history with the storytelling, and most impressive of all, he pulls off an ending that is both practically satisfying and wonderfully symbolic -- two things that don't often go hand-in-hand.

From The Son, by Philipp Meyer, Chapter Nineteen:

All in all, it was the greatest summer I had ever had.... I might be killed any day, by whites or hostile Indians, I might be run down by a grizzly or a pack of buffalo wolves, but I rarely did anything I didn't feel like doing, and maybe this was the main difference between the whites and the Comanches, which was the whites were willing to trade all their freedom to live longer and eat better, and the Comanches were not willing to trade any of it.

Lonesome cowboys

While on my end-of-summer vacation I whipped through Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove -- a big, sprawling tale that I missed entirely in its hey-dey; I even managed to miss the mini-series, an omission I'll correct before too long. I had to make myself put it down every now and then to save my eyes. It's the kind of book that has become more and more rare as I grow older -- an honest-to-God page-turner.

I've got a soft spot for westerns and the romance that clings to the idea of the cowboy. My dad's long love-affair with the wide open spaces of Montana is also a draw. I've never been there myself, but I'm fascinated by it because of his travels that started when he was a teenager, old enough to hitchhike out west from Virginia and give my Grandma a conniption, and to cowboy enough to earn his keep on the ranch of some distant relatives for a summer. He kept going back over the years, and the picture is from one of the trips when my Mom went with him, squatting on the sunlit plains in that pretty golden light.

It's a book lovingly written. McMurtry gives his characters space to fill out and take on a life of their own. In some ways they have the stock traits you would expect -- the laconic loner Call, the good-time gambler and womanizer Spoon, and the loquacious dispenser of droll cowboy humor MacRae. There's a full cast of cowboys, Indians, whores, and outlaws, but they all manage to rise out of their stock characters and do surprising, touching, and, often, desperate things.

The basic outline of the story follows the Hat Creek outfit several years after the Civil War. Ex-Texas Rangers Call and MacRae, who have fought the Comanches and Kiowa, and protected the Texas settlers along the Mexican border, have settled down to trade horses and sell cows with a collection of hands, some of them from their Rangering days, which are now over. When their old friend and cohort Spoon arrives running from trouble he caused in Arkansas as a drifting gambler, he shakes them out of their routine of raiding for horses and cattle in Mexic0 with the idea of driving cattle to Montana and claiming the wild land there, which is still harried by the northern tribes and remains mostly unsettled.

The Hat Creek boys light out for Montana, and the perils of the long drive of three-thousand miles serves as the backdrop for the action. Deaths are varied and constant as they traverse the wide open plains, stalked by an array of dangers including bandits, Indians, wild animals and unrelenting weather. There are female characters in this world of men: the unfortunate Lorena Wood, an implacable prostitute who falls in with Spoon on the promise that he will leave the drive along the way and take her to San Francisco, only to be captured by a vicious Indian bandit called Blue Duck; another prostitute, who has married a hapless, small-town sheriff on the trail of Spoon; and independent Clara, MacRae's longtime love, who has married a horse-trader and moved north to the Nebraska plains.

The world that McMurtry creates is one that visits misfortune and terror on both the just and the unjust, but one thing that it often rewards -- at least for awhile -- is competence. Call and MacRae have already built outsize reputations for themselves as Rangers and their abilities have allowed them to reach their golden years, still able to out-fight and out-think anyone who challenges them. Call and MacRae are one of the great literary duos -- as different as two men can be, but tied to each other through mutual loyalty and shared history. It's old-fashioned stuff but I like old-fashioned. And of course, I couldn't read it without thinking of Cormac McCarthy and thinking about where they sort of dovetail and where they diverge with their visions of the west. No doubt, McMurtry stays a little closer to the myth that McCarthy both punctures and extends -- mostly by creating a slightly-altered myth, peering from America's "manifest destiny" record of murder and pillage to an apocalyptic future.

I've often pondered the lives of those first pioneers and all that they faced and endured to stake their claims. The hardships and dangers seem nearly unimaginable to a soft, lily-livered creature like me, but I suppose people have always plunged into things blithely unaware of the reality, and then just had to survive once they were in it. I guess, if I had stumbled into it like that, I'd just be stuck with the situation, which is probably how most people ended up. I may yet see the Bighorn Mountains and the Milk River one day, relying primarily on my competence in avoiding being eaten by a big Grizzly bear. I think I can do it.