Tag Archives: American West

Escaping a Predator: The Widow Nash

23 Monday Jul 2018

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Review: The Widow Nash, by Jamie Harrison
Counterpoint, 2017. 373 pp. $26

It’s 1904, and Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey has just buried her grandmother in the East and wants nothing more than to retrieve her bearings. But a summons comes from Seattle, one she can’t ignore: Her father, Walton, is losing his mind to tertiary syphilis, likely dying. More importantly to the two men who send for her, Walton has misplaced or hidden or spent a fortune reaped from the sale of African mines, and part of that money is due them. Dulcy, as she’s known, is essential to the task of deciphering Walton’s notebooks and figuring out what he did with the money, for she’s traveled the world with him and knows his secrets. Or so they believe.

Their conviction brings much misery to Dulcy, and here lies the biggest flaw of this often splendid, engaging novel. Victor Maslingen, her former fiancé, imprisons Dulcy in Seattle, and his henchman, Henning Falk, immediately welches on the promises he made to keep Victor in check. Surprisingly, Dulcy never even protests, only sets out to care for her father, living up to her second name, Cordelia.

Moreover, if she’s ever regretted breaking her engagement, all you need to know is that Henning has furnished Victor’s office with objects that don’t break if they’re thrown. Unfortunately, people aren’t as sturdy; and Dulcy’s first name, Leda, suggests what Victor has done before and keeps threatening to do again. In fact, Victor is such a completely unappealing, unbalanced character, he could fill a page in the DSM by himself. And the strange part is, nobody who knows him (other than Henning) can understand why Dulcy threw him over. To a degree, her reticence to share the story is quite understandable. As Harrison shows, a woman may be the soul of virtue, but society will still condemn her for lodging such an accusation.

Nevertheless, the central conflict of this novel results from two clichéd characterizations, a masochist and a sociopath, and during the long Seattle narrative, little changes. We get Dulcy’s sufferings and discursions into Walton’s past life and travels with his daughter, some of which is interesting, much of it simply appalling, as when Walton carelessly and unconscionably passes his syphilis to his wife, killing the children she bears subsequently and later, herself. Meanwhile, the main narrative treads water while Dulcy works up the courage to escape, and you may be forgiven for wondering when she’s going to get it.

Yet The Widow Nash is about running away, and round about page 120, Dulcy manages to rescue herself and the novel. Unfortunately, Harrison wants you to believe that Victor will pursue Dulcy if he ever traces her — that’s why he has to be a sociopath, I suppose —and that Henning, who’s far more practical and therefore more dangerous, will help. Or maybe he won’t, because he has a soul and a conscience when the narrative absolutely requires. That’s the trouble with over-the-top characters; they can’t bend, so everyone else has to, even in illogical directions.

Henry Wellge’s 1904 photo of Butte, Montana, population 60,000 (courtesy Library of Congress)

When Dulcy settles in a Montana town, assuming the name Mrs. Nash and declaring her widowhood, the novel settles in too. How she keeps her secret from the nosy matrons makes a wry, entertaining narrative, and though predators flourish here — most especially the chief of police — there’s good-heartedness that Dulcy drinks in and wonders whether she’s dreaming. Most fiction about the American prairie that I’ve read stresses how plain and boring life can be, but where Dulcy lives, there’s never a dull moment.

One reason Harrison can get away with a few mistakes and still come out with a good novel is that her prose evokes not just a setting, but a way of life:

Walton packed an India rubber bath, which liked to collapse suddenly, and his medicines often shattered, the fumes poisoning fellow travelers. Travel meant being wet and cold or dry and hot;… Pushy, mustachioed men in uniform, demanding imaginary paperwork at sudden borders; dusty telegraph offices and banks with wayward hours and false coinage; mysterious meat, leathery fruit.… insects skittering over mattresses or rappelling down at high speed from dark ceilings, the flutter of bats and whisper of mice.… He’d opened the wide world for her but sluiced away her joy.

And though the world of this novel is a very violent one, the people Dulcy meets in Montana have a zest for life, or many do, and that’s just what she needs, having been beaten down so long. I think that Harrison could have gotten to that point much sooner and more directly, and if that meant jettisoning discussions of Walton’s pseudoscientific theories about volcanoes and earthquakes and the interconnection of all human events, so much the better. I think the themes of The Widow Nash are well established without that. But if you can get past these excesses and the clunky narrative machinery before Dulcy’s escape, the novel offers rewards.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Limit of Good Intentions: Hour Glass

23 Monday Apr 2018

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Review: Hour Glass, by Michelle Rene
Amberjack, 2018. 292 pp. $15

The Black Hills of South Dakota are no place for two children to fend for themselves, especially in August 1876, barely a month after Little Bighorn. But that’s the trouble that twelve-year-old Jimmy Glass, and his six-year-old half-sister, Flower, face when their father, their only parent, catches smallpox. Jimmy doesn’t know what ails his Pa, but it looks serious. It’s up to them to find a doctor, so the two manage to load Pa into a wagon, for which they have no horse, and sweat the contraption into Deadwood, the nearest town.

Deadwood exists because of the gold strike in the Black Hills, and the miners’ presence defies Federal law, which had supposedly kept “settlers” out of Sioux territory. So Deadwood isn’t merely a garden-variety frontier brothel-and-casino town, but one with defiant vengeance in its bones. And, it should be said, Flower is a potential target, as half Lakota Sioux and developmentally different — she doesn’t speak, won’t look people in the eye, and hates to be touched. When asked to say her name, the best she can reply is Ower. That becomes Hour; hence the title.

C. E. Finn’s 1880s photograph of Calamity Jane (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The relationship between the protective older brother and the emotionally inexpressive sister offers a twist on a familiar theme: Innocent children melt hard, greedy hearts. What’s more, who else should take the besieged children under her wing than Calamity Jane, as colorful a figure as you could want? She drinks like ten fish, curses like a sailor, but shoots straight, rides hard, and takes no guff from any man. In fact, on first meeting, Jimmy is convinced she is a man, a whisper of the feminist theme that pervades the novel:

Her skin was tanned and leathery, and she wore the uniform of a pioneer. If she had any bit of femininity about her shape, it was hidden beneath the layers of buckskin. Her hat was a man’s hat, worn from use, ornamented with Indian feathers. Everything about her had read ‘man’ until she pulled away that bandana to show the more delicate features of a woman’s mouth. Her crystal-blue eyes glared down at me as I froze in place.

Through Jane’s good offices, Pa Glass is put in quarantine with other smallpox victims, where she tends him herself. Dora DuFran, the madam of Diddlin’ Dora’s (no lie), takes in the children, who immediately become the pets of the house. But for me, the chief charm of Hour Glass is how Jimmy treats his little sister and does his best to look out for her. We’d all be proud of a son like him, sensitive, empathic, trying his best to play the man’s role he’s been thrust into when he knows he’s still a child. Jimmy also has a preternatural gift for peacemaking, and it’s hard not to like that too.

But it’s equally hard to figure out how he gained such self-knowledge and skills, for, like much else in Hour Glass, they just seem to fall out of the sky. How indeed would a young boy born to tragedy, likely having no playmates and only one parent who is probably too busy to spend much time on him, seem so fully formed in self-concept and so talented socially? To me, this is the sort of novel that works while you’re reading it, because you’re caught up in adventure after adventure. But after you put it down, you think, No.

None of the good guys ever does anything really bad, and there are no villains, only an occasional badass. Disagreements never leave lingering resentments or even change the course of the story. Though each chapter moves well, once the episode is done, it’s on to the next, with very little reflection. For instance, despite the feminism and good-heartedness that inform this novel, Jimmy never reckons with what a brothel is, or what it must be like to work there. His notions of sex are formed enough to make him draw back in horror at the notion that his sister might be condemned to that life one day. Yet he never connects his fear to the women he sees, which allows him to have unalloyed gratitude toward Dora, who’s profiting off them.

I’m glad Jimmy and his sister get taken care of — nobody wants to see kids suffer — yet I also want them to struggle, to face more prejudice and suspicion than they do, to get into fixes that even Calamity Jane can’t rescue them from. I can’t help think that not only does the author try too hard to protect her characters, pulling back from her strong premise, she has superimposed a twenty-first-century sensibility on a nineteenth-century narrative. Unfortunately, her choice of language sometimes suggests as much, as when her characters use words or phrases like backlash, fine with it, or best-case scenario.

Late in the novel, Jane remarks of her own legend spinning that “folks don’t want real stories.” Maybe not, but the lies have to seem like truth.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Life As a Messenger: News of the World

10 Monday Jul 2017

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Review: News of the World, by Paulette Jiles
Morrow, 2016. 213 pp. $23

The protagonist of this engaging, thoughtful novel, Jefferson Kyle Kidd, has an unusual profession. An itinerant version of a town crier, he travels the Texas frontier in 1870, reading carefully selected stories from out-of-town newspapers and charges his listeners a dime admission. Captain Kidd, as he’s known, dresses to project an image of an educated, experienced person of wide understanding, a role that comes easily, and chooses those stories that he thinks will fire the imaginations of his audience. He’s seldom wrong.

But it’s not just the captain’s profession or bearing that set him apart. A veteran of two wars, including that of 1812, and a southerner whose sons-in-law died for the Confederacy, Kidd has too much empathy to resort to race prejudice, reserving his hatred for viciousness, bullying, or predatory behavior. He likes his roving life, or so he believes, and there’s no tonic like his own company. And yet, he’s begun to realize that all isn’t what it could be.

He had become impatient of trouble and other people’s emotions. His life seemed to him thin and sour, a bit spoiled, and it was something that had only come upon him lately. A slow dullness had seeped into him like coal gas and he did not know what to do about it except seek out quiet and solitude. He was always impatient to get the readings over with now.

After this particular reading, he greets Britt Johnson, a black freedman whom he calls friend, who has a favor to ask. Britt has been given a fifty-dollar gold piece to bring a young girl to San Antonio, a four-hundred mile trip, returning her to her aunt and uncle following several years’ captivity with the Kiowas. Britt doesn’t want the job, partly because his two companions and he have urgent business elsewhere, but mostly because transporting a white girl would likely get him lynched. Kidd doesn’t want to be responsible for anyone, especially a ten-year-old who acts half-feral and will probably bolt at the first chance she gets. He’s raised two daughters, so he’s “done with all that,” he’s in his seventies, and he’s had enough trouble. But he can’t turn away from a friend, and the girl’s an orphan, after all, and no doubt saw the Kiowa kill her parents. She needs help.

“In Summer, Kiowa,” 1898, Frank A. Rinehart’s platinum, hand-colored print (courtesy Boston Public Library via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Johanna, as Kidd calls her, is a handful and then some. She has no use for shoes, clothes as he understands them, table manners, kindness, or conversation–not that he speaks Kiowa or that she remembers English. And yes, Johanna does try to run away. But she also possesses wilderness skills that he appreciates (except when she misuses them in embarrassing ways) and courage under fire, which tells him she’s seen armed combat. As you’d expect, over time and circumstance, the two unwilling traveling companions learn each other, a little, and protect each other a lot.

They have several adventures that don’t turn out the way they anticipate; Jiles understands how to work the “no–and furthermore.” The reason they work, however, is that each connects to Kidd’s outlook, particularly his views of the cultural and racial divides that lead people to hate perfect strangers simply for what they (apparently) represent. It’s a clear-eyed lesson and as up-to-date as you could want, but it’s also a primer on how to write a novel. The exposition of the theme and the main character’s inner life are inseparable, and this is why he’s such a winning protagonist. For Kidd, who’s seen much of life and is looking forward to rest and peace and quiet during his final years–and who therefore has a certain perspective on younger people scurrying around–the question becomes, What does it all mean?

And his answer, which fits his profession, his difficult errand, and his refusal to take himself too seriously, is very simple. “Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news.” He wonders whether each person has just one message to bring through life, which may or may not have anything to do directly with the bearer, but you have no choice. You have to carry it.

In reading News of the World, that idea gives me something to think about.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Westward, Ho!: The Way West

04 Monday Jan 2016

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Review: The Way West, by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
Mariner/Houghton, 2002 [1949]. 340 pp. $14

A wagon train sets forth from Missouri in 1845, bound for Oregon. That may not sound like much of a premise. Nor does Guthrie stud his plot with grand, sweeping action. Nevertheless, this classic Western (from the author who wrote the screenplay for Shane, also a classic) provides as gripping a tale as I’ve read in a while, simply by recounting the trials involved in traversing more than a thousand miles of unmarked wilderness, day after day, month after month.

Alfred Jacob Miller's painting, from memory, of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, before 1840 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Alfred Jacob Miller’s painting, from memory, of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, before 1840 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

His secret? The desires, dreams, and perceptions of his characters–their inner lives–spill from every page. I feel that I know these people intimately, so I care what happens to them, even if I don’t like them (and some are decidedly unlikable). At times, they act like a loose-knit family, with all its kindnesses, quirks, and dysfunctions. But their disputes, alliances, interests, and consideration for one another (or lack of it, sometimes), however minor or mundane they are, take on outsize proportions.

For instance, when one of the needier, less accomplished travelers pleads openly for help, his request sounds “womanish” to one man, prompting that listener to grapple with what he’d never reflected on before, notions of how men and women differ. It’s a recurrent theme in the novel, especially evident in how the supposedly weaker sex displays tremendous strength and fortitude. But the character’s reflections imply another, larger purpose. The people making this journey aren’t just finding a new home; they’re finding out who they are.

Guthrie handles this brilliantly. He portrays his characters from several angles–how they feel about themselves, how they want others to see them, how they behave in groups, and when by themselves. The politics, in the broadest sense, start from the first pages, when the self-appointed leader of the expedition tries to recruit men he thinks will be useful to him. It’s a vivid, involving scene, because you can already sense which way the power lines run; what each man hopes to accomplish; what seduces them; and who’s trying to seduce. Even the man serving them drinks has a viewpoint, subtly suggested–he’s worried that good customers will be leaving town. And the only thing that “happens” is that these men begin to think of pulling up stakes and heading west. I admire this kind of writing, which can make high drama out of a glass or three of whiskey.

Among my favorite characters is Dick Summers, a laconic mountain man hired to guide the wagon train. He always knows more than he says, which is why the more perceptive people seek him out, and he never rushes to condemn anybody. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a dead shot, a gifted tracker, understands and partly admires Native American ways, and knows the trail. However, as in many other novels about the American West, Dick also represents the man who’ll have no place in the society that the people he’s guiding will create. What sets him apart most is an outlook:

These [men] couldn’t enjoy life as it rolled by; they wanted to make something out of it, as if they could take it and shape it to their way if only they worked and figured hard enough. They didn’t talk beaver and whisky and squaws or let themselves soak in the weather; they talked crops and water power and business and maybe didn’t even notice the sun or the pale green of new leaves except as something along the way to whatever it is they wanted to be and to have. Later they might look back, some of them might, and wonder how it happened that things had slid by them.

At times, Dick Summers seems a little too good to be true–always on the right side, ever patient, never selfish, understands himself clearly. Yet the above passage strikes me as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. Reading The Way West, I have to wonder whether dreams are useless, if you miss what happens on your way to realizing them.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.