Wednesday's Western: Robert Flynn's ECHOES OF GLORY

Robert Flynn's Echoes of Glory, was published in 2009 by TCU Press, Fort Worth, Texas, in trade paperback.  The cover illustration, credited to Vicki Whistler, is fine and fitting with the themes of the novel, but I wish that this had been published instead in a magnificently deluxe hardcover, in a larger, easier-to-read font, with a sturdy bulk suggesting its considerable substance.

I first heard of it when it won the 2010 Spur Award as best western novel of the previous year, and I counted it among the very best new novels out of hundreds I've read in the last few years.  It is a modern western set in Texas during the Reagan administration, part parable, part satire, part social commentary, and all together just a hell of a good novel.


Opening lines:  "Sheriff Timpson Smith lumbered through the dim, drafty Mills County Courthouse, his bootheels gunshots on the on the wooden floor.  The courthouse--a stone breadbox with a metal birdcage for a bell tower--was not built for grace or beauty but for the assertion of authority."

"Lumbered" is the right word, for the sheriff and the courthouse are built the same way in the imaginations of the population.  The people of the county trust their sheriff, a Korean War hero who had served in the legendary outfit recruited from their county, many of whom had been killed.  Sheriff Smith was a very reluctant war hero, always haunted by guilt about it and trying to compensate in the manner of some other kindred fictional Texas sheriffs--James Lee Burkes's Sheriff Holland of Rain Gods: A Novel and Cormac McCarthy's Sheriff Bell of No Country for Old Men.

Echoes of Glory is set in a mainstream Texas which is neither east nor west, " a philosophical rather than geographical distinction.  East Texas was closer to the plow than to the horse, closer to Gettysburg than to Little Big Horn, closer to plantation than to reservation.  West Texans favored wild over tame, believed that God's gifts to men were guns, dogs, women, and pick-ups evolved from horses; more inclined to drygulching than lynching, to fighting than reasoning.  Mills County was in the center whether you said branch or bayou, arroyo or gully."    

People trust Smith, their war hero sheriff, but they don’t trust politicians in general, such as Mayor Williams:

“Williams was mayor because his older brother, the one you could count on, died with Second Platoon and because voters didn’t like certainty in public office. Except for sheriff. There, certainty was important and if the sheriff said someone was guilty they probably were or they wouldn’t have been arrested.  Trials were for show like weddings for couples who had been living together for years.”

As the story opens, the trusted sheriff is about to retire and will most likely be succeeded by his most macho deputy.  The deputy is dispatched to quell a dispute between neighbors and shoots and kills a man, who brandished a gun but was about to surrender.  This incident sets the story in motion.

For the man shot was an old "war hero" too, from the same outfit as the sheriff, and he was also one of the county's Mills family, legendary in Texas history and for whom the country had been named.

“The Mills family had an outdated code of honor that made them seem combative. They required an honesty that some found intimidating. Quick to laugh, they were fierce when threatened, and sensitivity to menace had passed from father to child. The Mills required a lot of space.”

The small incident gathers lies and legends in parallel with the larger events of history, the Korean War incident and the Battle of the Alamo itself.  The small distortions of legend universally echo the larger ones.  The author evinces a fine grasp of human nature, and his wordplay and humor are subtle and often take you by surprise.

The sheriff "had believed in God, believed in America; they were almost synonymous," but he finds now that there is a difference between the county's poor old spiritual church and its modern monied church endorsing capitalism:

". . .poor uneducated Bible punchers preaching a stern God who expected his followers to work hard, to act with mercy and humility, and to expect nothing from this world.  Not power, not riches, least of all justice.  'The Lord will repay," they proclaimed.  The frontier had passed and with it those inclined to wait on the Lord.  Folks gravitated to churches like Pastor Murphy's Solid Rock Church where a benevolent God required only a little earnest money before pouring out his blessings on his chosen.  God repaid donors to Murphy's church and school tenfold tenfold what they had given, dollars to those who needed dollars, dollars for days for those who needed days.   'That's a better deal,' folks agreed, even in Mills County where God previously repaid good deed and charity in the hereafter."

The pastor of the poor church "never asked why bad things happened to good people; salvation was not a rabbit's foot and he didn't need the threat of everlasting punishment to believe.  Why good people did bad things to others in the name of goodness was something he pondered every day."

The novel is set during the 1980s, some thirty years ago, but even then, people "loved rugged individualism in books or on the screen," but not in real life "where there was less of it every year.  Mom and pop stores had disappeared" and everything was owned by corporations, and neither corporations nor elected officials were accountable.

Despite winning the Spur Award, this novel elsewhere seems to have flown under the radar as few people placed it on their year-end best lists, neither last year or the year before.  Well, it was on mine.

The author's website is at this link.  I haven't yet read any of his other novels except for North to Yesterday (Texas Tradition Series), which is a great trail drive novel, a western parable featuring father/son bonding.  I'll review it in this space one day soon.  

Wednesday's Western: Little Known Gems That You Ought To Enjoy

Contrary to popular belief, I think that in general westerns are better written now than they ever were.  Forget about western movies and westerns on TV, I'm referring to western novels, set in the American West.

The Spur Award winner this past year was Robert Flynn's Echoes of Glory, so fine that it made my short list of best novels of 2010.  Such a splendid novel all the way around, a western, a satire, and a literary novel, told with wit and nuance.


The only reason this novel hasn't gotten more acclaim is that not too many have bothered to read it, being a modern western and published only in trade paperback.


For many years, the Spur Awards featured mediocre novels, whether by design or through politics, I couldn't say.  But good westerns continued to be published, at least two or three a year.


 In recent years, the quality of winners has greatly increased.  This year's Spur Award in the YA Novel division was won by Johnny Boggs' coming-of-age story, Hard Winter: A Western Story (Five Star Western Series).  I read it when it first came out and thought it might take top honors over all.  Boggs writes a good western every time, it seems, and after reading Camp Ford, I decided to buy all of his backlist of novels, most of them now on my to-be-read shelf.


Year before last, Thomas Cobb's Shavetail won the Spur Award.  Cobb became known that year, not because of this excellent novel, but because of the novel he wrote a decade earlier, which was then made into the movie Crazy Heart starring Jeff Bridges.


A naturalistic novel, the plot of Shavetail builds around the possible abduction of a woman by Apaches. Like Helen of Troy, she becomes a mythic symbol, a cause for war, a McGuffin which may be real or may be wrongly imagined. Although quite a few westerns have been built on similar premises, Thomas Cobb's fine novel is not predictable. Reading it, you feel like anything might happen. Try to guess and be surprised. There is no good-guy/bad-guy dualism; instead there are human universals and a sense of naturalism.

The snake in the opening paragraph, "suspended in a state neither asleep nor awake," seems to be a literary metaphor for death-in-life, as later there are suggestions of an awakening of mindfulness. Different readers will see different levels of meaning, but it is still a fine read even if you see nothing beyond the surface story in here.

It is no spoiler here to say the book has an ending that many should enjoy, genre western readers as well as mainstream readers of literary novels. The author did his historical research and he names his sources in an afterword to the novel. The story is well paced and although there are many nuances, they are not at all difficult to discern.  The hardcover edition is handsome and easy to read.

THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2010

In Kentucky, we have a white Christmas this morning.  It is warm enough for kids to play in the snow, but not so warm as to melt it away.  Christmas is for gratitude, and I’m grateful for the day.

I’m grateful for the love of my family and friends, for world enough and time. And among the books I’m grateful to have read this year are:

Clancy Martin's How to Sell: A Novel. A crime novel, a coming-of-age novel, an indictment of capitalism, a darkly humorous literary take on American materialism. Modern American noir.

Robert Flynn's Echoes of Glory. This year's Spur Award winner has yet to catch on and doesn't seem to appear on any other best list. A shame, that--it is an excellent novel on all levels, brilliant as a parable, as a satire, as a novel of flesh and blood.  Witty and insightful and literary.

Austin Wright's Tony and Susan. This is a literary novel in the form of a genre novel, a novel within a novel.  Not originally published this year, but about to be reissued in hardcover.  I've reread it now and I see even more in it--much, much more. Its literary kin includes both Joseph Conrad’s VICTORY and Cormac McCarthy’s OUTER DARK.  A little-known gem that sent me in search of Wright's other obscure works.

Peter Temple’s Truth: A Novel, a splendid follow-up to his earlier novel, THE BROKEN SHORE. This author understands the evils of bureaucracy and he tells a story you can believe in.  Temple has garnered several awards now, and more will follow.

Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule, the longshot winner of the National Book Award.  A literary novel set on the backstretch of a minor thoroughbred racetrack with engaging characters and a flair for pathos and dark humor.  I reviewed it at Amazon.

The most life-changing books I read this year, the ones which most affected my world-view, were Margaret Atwood's Payback, DEBT AND THE SHADOW SIDE OF WEALTH, David Loy's The World Is Made of Stories, and Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death (which I encountered earlier in David Loy's eye-opening Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism).  And my reading of Austin Wright's RECALCITRANCE: WILLIAM FAULKNER AND THE PROFESSORS changed forever the way I evaluate literary novels.

I've read several books on consciousness this year, the best of them being Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.  I also enjoyed Robert Lanza's Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, and Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain .  Damasio's earlier books are also fine and he is a frequent guest on Charlie Rose's series on brain science.

The best poetry I read this year was in The Etiquette of Freedom: Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and The Practice of the Wild.  The text is a transcript of the CD which comes with the book.  Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison candidly discuss their secular-buddhist philosophy of life and read from their works.  I also enjoyed Jane Hirshfield's essays on poetry in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.

The best baseball book I read this year was John Wilker's Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards.  Part history, part coming-of-age story, warmly humorous.  A gem.  I also discovered Ron Faust's fine mystery,  Fugitive Moon, published back in 1995, about a high-strung baseball pitcher who becomes a fugitive after killings occur in whatever town he happens to be pitching in.

The best war novel I read this year was published back in 2005, Bright Starry Banner: a novel of the Civil War by Alden R. Carter.  It follows the history of the Battle of Stones River very closely, mixing in some fictional Cormac McCarthy-like descriptions of historical events.  I've read nothing else quite like it.

Early in the year, I read David Eagleman's delightful Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, with different humorous takes on the cosmology of the universe and mankind's place in it.  It was published in 2009, and I was led to it by last year's best lists found at the LARGEHEARTED BOY BLOG.

I've read several excellent biographies this year including Frank McLynn's Marcus Aurelius: A Life, James E. Person's Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind, and Frederick Robert Karl's Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives- A Biography.  I also enjoyed Eric Williamson's autobiographical left-wing memoir Oakland, Jack London, and Me, Leslie Marmon Silko's work of personal heritage, THE TURQUOISE LEDGE, and Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter.


There were many holocaust-related novels published this year, and I read a very good one: Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil: A Novel.  That it doesn't appear on many best lists is something I fail to understand in this, the year of Franzen's FREEDOM and Larsson's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.  I read those too, good ones but greatly overplayed in comparison.

I was touted onto Paul Harding's small gem, TINKERS, and to James Hynes' NEXT, which I read in an ARC thanks to Amazon's Vine Program.  Hynes writes an outstanding novel every time, but like Daniel Woodrell, he seems to be little read outside of a small cult of loyal fans.  Count me as one of them.  Michael Crummy's DAMAGES belongs on this list, as well as Joseph Boyden's brilliant THREE DAY ROAD, published back in 2005.

This was the year I studied Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island after reading Robert A. Prather's The Strange Case of Jonathan Swift and the Real Long John Silver.  I don't buy the DiVinci Code theories, but the history itself is awe-inspiring and well worth reading.

Early in the year, I read some fine westerns, most of them Spur Award winners including Thomas Cobb's superb SHAVETAIL, Johnny Boggs's HARD WINTER and KILLSTRAIGHT.  Then I started reading Craig Johnson's splendid series starting with THE COLD DISH.  I have several of them to go before I catch up to this year's Walt Longmire novel.  His characters make good company.

This was also the year I discovered Emerald Noir, Ken Bruen's THE GUARDS, John Connolly's EVERY DEAD THING, Adrian McKinty's DEAD I WELL MAY BE, Declan Burke's THE BIG O, and Eoin McManee's THE RESURRECTION MAN.  I have many more in their backlists to read, and Ken Bruen's well-read protagonist led me to some other interesting books.  What a treat!

 In October, I read several Halloween-related books including Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, then Peter Ackroyd's  A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters, then Norman Partridge's Johnny Halloween: Tales of the Dark Season and Dark Harvest.  I also read Mike Ashley's excellent Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood which goes into the spiritualism of the fantasy/occult novelist.

In November, I went on a reading excursion into books that used the cat as a symbol for naturalism--books akin to such as Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Track Of The Cat (Western Literature Series) and Peter Matthiessen's THE SNOW LEOPARD:



Caught in Fading Light: Mountain Lions, Zen Masters, and Wild Nature by Gary Thorp. The author goes on a quest to see a cougar in the wild. He seems to be more of a formal Buddhist than either Jim Harrison or Gary Snyder.  A smaller book and a lighter read than the others here.

The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild by Craig Childs.  The strikingly beautiful picture of a cougar in the snow graces the dustjacket.  Childs is a great story-teller.

The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America David Baron. This book is not new, but I'm glad to have finally read it.  On the first edition, it carries the same dustjacket picture as THE ANIMAL DIALOGUES but stylized and darker.

Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion, edited by Susan Ewing and Elizabeth Grossman. A treasure-chest of essays on the elusive lion/panther/puma quest, including Pam Houston's "Looking For Abbey's Lion."

Water Witches by Chris Bohjalian. A fine ghostly catamount quest novel (among other things) that I first read back when it first came out in 1995.  The epigraph is from Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." About the frozen leopard found high in the mythical house of God. "No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."