WEDNESDAY'S WESTERNS and THE SNOWSTORM

What blizzard?

Some ten years ago or so, I read both Claire Davis's Winter Range, which had then just been published, with Alan LeMay's Winter Range (1932) in tandem.  The former is a contemporary literary western, as its title implies, but it is also a love story, a meditation on the humane treatment of animals, and a study of the values of a small community. The author has a gift of dialog and writes some beautiful descriptive passages, including her description of the novel's snowstorm.

It was also interesting to compare the history and sense of identity of Pattiann, the author's female protagonist, with that of Judy Blunt, author of the memoir, Breaking Clean. Blunt's memoir is also an excellent tandem read, and in the front of the book she provides us with a map which comes in handy reading either book.

Blunt is also the first person Davis thanks on the acknowledgments page of her novel, and Blunt thanked Davis in the front of her memoir.  Coincidence seems to be the norm in westerns, and I found similar passages in LeMay's Winter Range, first published back in 1932, though I doubt that either Blunt or Davis ever read it, despite the shared title.

Snowstorms are naturally standard fare in novels set in the American West, but some are more memorable than others.  One of the best is prominent in John Williams' excellent Butcher's Crossing (New York Review Books Classics), first published back in 1960 and better known now than then.

   

Above is the first edition dustjacket of Butcher's Crossing.  I like the design, considering the content of the novel, but it is difficult to find in fine condition.

The cover on the NYRB edition is also a good choice.  This marvelous novel was little known before the NYRB sought it our and published it in their efforts to revive forgotten gems.  I'm grateful to them for that.

With a plot that ties two historic hard winters together, Johnny D. Boggs deserves a mention for this book, which won the YA Spur Award but might have been considered for top overall honors.  True, it is a character-driven coming-of-age novel, but it also says a lot about historical cowboy economics and the hardships such winters wrought on livestock and humans alike.

No doubt the current hard winter will be the legendary source of its own yarns to be told in years to come.

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.