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Tag Archives: Kansas

Blood Money: Savage Country

22 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1873, bigotry, book review, Buffalo, Comanches, descriptions of nature, historical fiction, Kansas, literary fiction, nineteenth century, pretentious language, Robert Olmstead, slavery, the West, violence

Review: Savage Country, by Robert Olmstead
Algonquin, 2017. 293 pp. $27

It’s rural Kansas, 1873, and many farmers have gone bust, whether from overextended investment, rapacious creditors, or the swarms of locusts that have wreaked destruction of biblical proportions. Elizabeth Coughlin, recently widowed and deeply in debt, decides to try to recoup her fortunes by assembling a buffalo hunting expedition. Properly cured buffalo hides are worth a fortune, prized as leather for factory drive belts or other applications requiring particular strength or resiliency. And to lead her expedition, Elizabeth asks her brother-in-law Michael, newly arrived from his latest journeys as a big-game hunter. Against his better judgment, Michael agrees — and no sooner has he said yes than the party gathers and prepares to head south. Michael, it seems, would rather do just about anything than talk, and when he’s around, life-changing decisions happen in a New York minute.

Digitally retouched photograph dating from the mid-1870s of a pile of bison skulls, to be ground into fertilizer (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

But he anticipates the dangers that lie ahead. As they cross the so-called dead line separating Kansas from Comanche territory, Michael finds the remains of a couple wagons whose murdered and scalped occupants make a grisly display. You know right away that Elizabeth’s quest will be a struggle to the death, but, as it happens, the Comanches aren’t the main antagonists. When it comes to raiders, white brigands are the worst; and if something burns, bites, floods, or falls from the sky, the Coughlin crew will have their fill of it. But what’s in the human heart causes even more misery, for it’s the pursuit of wealth, especially wealth that comes through killing, which destroys the spirit as well as the body.

Savage Country shows this in its vivid, gruesome descriptions of the buffalo hunt in its appalling carnage, and the inevitable rivalries and prejudices that divide the expedition. For instance, when a group of sick, starving black escapees arrives from a turpentine plantation — a form of industrial slavery — Elizabeth hires them to skin hides as a kind of rescue. But you sense that violence will erupt sooner or later, because not all her employees share her outlook.

It’s violence that shapes Savage Country, and I say that even as I recall other unflinching novels about the West, such as The News of the World or The Way West, which involve their share of brutality. Olmstead’s tale will deter some, but I, who consider myself squeamish, didn’t recoil. Maybe it’s because the violence establishes its own context, and that the characters, Michael and Elizabeth especially, try to make sense of it. And Michael has seen it before:

Michael listened to what the reverend doctor had to say until his mind began to wander. He held no anticipation of punishment or reward after death. He experienced no terror of the underworld, of the afterlife. He had no dread of suffering upon perishing. He believed in the transition of souls into horses and in the second sight of dogs and their ability to see invisible spirits and witches. He believed in omens and dreams and warnings and instinct. He believed, contrary to the Gospels, the meek, however blessed, would not inherit the earth.

But Michael, the rock of the narrative, resembles that substance in his refusal to express anything, which grates after a while. His deliberate terseness sometimes comes across as harsh and unyielding as the weather. The narrative succeeds best, I think, in its vivid descriptions of life and death on the prairie, which are as tense and dramatic as could be. But when it comes to human speech, the characters — even those who show more of themselves — don’t speak as much as they declare, as if they were coining homespun aphorisms, or trying to. I don’t believe that late-nineteenth-century frontier folk avoided contractions like the plague or snarled their syntax to avoid saying an extra word. Here, their language can be so stilted as to sound pretentious, and these people are anything but.

Still, I found the novel worth reading, both for its depictions of nature and the way it dramatizes its central themes. As Elizabeth observes, “For all the slave lords the war had killed, a new generation was born in their ashes and born inside of the new generation was the enmity of the old.”

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

Get Out of Dodge: Doc

24 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Bat Masterson, book review, Civil War, dentistry, Doc Holliday, Dodge City, historical fiction, Kansas, legends of the Old West, literary fiction, Mary Doria Russell, nineteenth century, psychological insight, tuberculosis, Wyatt Earp

Review: Doc, by Mary Doria Russell
Random House, 2011. 394 pp. $26

Imagine an 1870s southern gentleman from Atlanta, schooled in Latin, Greek, French, and the latest techniques in dentistry, such as the use of ether and restorative surgery. He treats everyone he meets with respect, though you’d do well not to question his truthfulness or mention the name William Tecumseh Sherman. He knows how to calm a frightened horse or a child, having innate empathy for both, and the hands that draw rotten teeth can play Beethoven on the piano like a virtuoso or deal faro or poker all night. But the great tragedy of this accomplished, engaging young man’s life–for he’s twenty-two–is that he’s dying of tuberculosis, the disease that took his beloved mother from him years before. He’s playing a losing hand against time, yet pretends he doesn’t know it.

John Henry Holliday's graduation photo from the Philadelphia School of Dentistry. He was not yet twenty-one (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

John Henry Holliday’s graduation photo from the Philadelphia School of Dental Surgery, 1872. He was not yet twenty-one (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

His name is John Henry Holliday, known as Doc. And if you read this marvelous biographical novel, which I highly recommend, you can forget anything you think you know or have heard about his reputation as a gunslinger or cold-blooded killer. According to Russell, who argues openly for her subject, there was plenty of mayhem in Dodge City, Kansas, where Holliday settles, hoping the climate will help his lungs, but few duels with six-shooters. And what Hollywood and popular legend have made of Wyatt Earp, the Earp brothers, the O.K. Corral, or Bat Masterson bears little resemblance to fact or, more importantly, a deeper, more compelling story.

Rather, Russell portrays a Holliday who wishes to live to the fullest. He loves poker, waxing philosophical about “the enchanted moment” when a bet is placed, when “anything is possible” and a “man’s debts and regrets and limitations disappear.” But true satisfaction comes in his dental office. For instance, having intuited that Wyatt Earp never smiles because of damaged teeth, Holliday deploys all the art and science he commands to ease his friend’s pain and make him happier. Lonely for people who understand Dostoyevsky, Austen, and Brahms, he’s ecstatic when he meets a former Prussian aristocrat turned Jesuit priest, with whom he discusses Scripture and music. When Father Arnsperger says that he heard Chopin himself play, Holliday dramatically flings himself back and responds, “I am prostrate with envy, sir!” It figures that the woman Doc takes up with, Mária Katerina Harony, known as Kate, comes from a Hungarian noble family and can quote Latin and Greek right back at him.

In less skilled authorial hands, a narrative like this could sound cute, superficial, or elbow-in-the-ribs obvious, quirky for its own sake, gimmicks to lure the reader with anecdote after anecdote about the rollicking Old West. Not here. Russell provides plenty of funny, poignant stories, and she’s combed the historical record for one-liners, a few of which are memorable. But the characters seem so completely themselves, and the time and place so fully lived in, that she achieves a portrait of Dodge in a wide, deep swath.

Front Street was alive with young men. Sauntering, staggering. Laughing, puking. Shouting in fierce strife or striking lewd whispered bargains with girls in bright dresses. They were giddy with liberty, these boys, free to do anything they could think of and pay for, unwatched by stern elders, unseen by sweethearts back home, unjudged by God, who had surely forsaken this small, bright hellhole in the immense, inhuman darkness that was west Kansas.

But it’s not just the vigorous prose; the characters’ stories illumine so many facets of life. For instance, Wyatt’s unsmiling, unflinching code of right and wrong forms a counterpoint to the rest of Dodge. The story behind Bob Wright, who owns the general store (and much else), captures local politics and business ethics. How people treat Mr. Jau, the Chinese laundryman who gives Doc herbal medicines for his TB, shows how racial prejudice plays out. And Kate, a whore like almost every other woman in town, exemplifies the unequal struggle against men, their desires, and self-aggrandizing misperceptions–she’s just more astute, if crazier, than her sisters.

Russell has researched so much about everything that it would be easy to ascribe her achievement to what she’s learned and how she’s deployed it. That’s certainly the public perception about historical fiction; tell someone you’ve just met that you write in that genre, and nine times in ten, you’ll be told how hard the research must be. But any good novelist, historical or otherwise, must have psychological insight, and you won’t find that in the library. What puts Russell in a different class, I think, is how she tackles issues like Doc’s feelings about death or Wyatt’s about bullies, which makes these characters–and the narrative–richer and fuller, not just another rollicking tale about the Old West.

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

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore: The Chaperone

21 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1920s, book review, flapper, historical fiction, Kansas, Laura Moriarty, literary fiction, Louise Brooks, New York, orphan trains, Progressives, Prohibition, racism, sexual revolution, social commentary

Review: The Chaperone, by Laura Moriarty
Riverhead, 2012. 371 pp. $27

The summer of 1922, fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks can’t wait to leave Wichita, Kansas, for a month-long New York tryout with an avant-garde dance company. Given the political and social tenor of Wichita, Louise’s parents seem unusually liberal and open-minded, but, to their daughter’s disgust, they give out that they’re looking for a respectable woman to chaperone her. Cora Carlisle, mother of two sons about to enter college, volunteers for the job, and the Brookses accept, while making it seem as if they’re doing her a favor. As for Louise, she promises to be absolutely horrible:

But there was no mistaking the contempt in the girl’s eyes. It was the way a child looked at the broccoli that must be eaten before dessert, the room that must be cleaned before playtime. It was a gaze of dread, made all the more punishing by the girl’s youth and beauty, her pale skin and pouting lips. Cora felt herself blushing. She had not been the subject of this sort of condescension in years.

However, that’s not half of it. No sooner have the two travelers boarded their train than Cora begins to sense what she’s up against. Louise has read all the books Cora has, and then some. She’s even brought Schopenhauer along, which would seem pure affectation, except that she’s marked passages where the philosopher’s observations move her. Unlike Cora, Louise disdains Prohibition, wears no corset (but plenty of makeup), and sees nothing wrong with letting men flirt with her, some of whom are old enough to be her father. Cora assumes that naive, inexperienced Louise is merely acting out, an adolescent unaware of consequences, and that her parents have been negligent in raising her. That they have, but she’s no innocent, nor do appearances fool her, as when she wonders how someone as dull and restrained as Cora could have attracted a man as handsome and successful as her husband. Naturally, the remark cuts the older woman to the quick, especially because, as the reader soon learns, Cora’s marriage isn’t what it seems.

Louise Brooks, circa 1929 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Louise Brooks, circa 1929 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Cinemaphiles may recognize Louise Brooks as a star of the silent screen; her bobbed hair helped make that style a symbol of the 1920s, and she was the film incarnation of the flapper. So in casting her opposite Cora, Moriarty has drawn the battle lines, for Cora is a fictional representation of a Midwestern Progressive who fought for woman suffrage but has the social and sexual prejudices common to her time and class. At first, therefore, The Chaperone promises to be a funny, sharply observed clash of outlook, to which the splendid sequences in New York, full of feeling and atmosphere, lend zest. Then, to Moriarty’s further credit, the narrative takes off to a higher level altogether.

Cora, it turns out, was an orphan, raised by a Catholic home for abandoned girls, and shipped by train westward, traveling station to station until someone liked the look of her and took her in. Several novelists have written about these trains, and no wonder (see, for example, My Notorious Life); what a heart-breaking story, and Cora’s had me cringing in pain. But the surprise of The Chaperone is that it’s not just Louise who’s looking forward to a taste of freedom in New York. Cora, who has been dutiful all her life, has undertaken to search for her birth mother, and though many obstacles get in her way, she won’t take no for an answer. She could never explain this to Louise, but of the two of them, she winds up having the more satisfying, successful trip.

The Chaperone is a wonderful book, beautifully written, the characters well drawn, even the minor ones. Moriarty thrusts them boldly into situations from which they don’t always emerge proud of themselves, and I like that–except when her earnestness gets the better of her. For instance, when Cora’s horrified to attend a theatrical performance where black and white sit together and the performers are African-American, the author immediately drops in a scene in which a more tolerant Cora talks to black activists in the 1970s. It’s as if Moriarty fears that we won’t like her heroine anymore and has to rescue her.

If there’s one problem with The Chaperone, it’s that discursiveness, the desire to tell all of Cora’s life. I don’t think Moriarty needs to, and the book runs at least fifty pages too long. They’re not bad pages, but they lack the substance of the rest, and the narrative has the feel of looking in vain for a strong ending. I think the story could have stopped years earlier, letting the reader imagine the rest. But still, it’s a terrific book.

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

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