novels – Page 2 – Mysterium Coniunctionis

The Sundial

Shirley Jackson has the distinction of having written the novel I’ve re-read the most. As of last January I’ve read The Haunting of Hill House seven times. I’ve also read many of her short stories and the lovely and mysterious novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle as well. But for some reason my 1990s paperback re-issue of The Sundial sat on several shelves in several houses for a few decades before I got around to it this week.

I suppose I needed to wait until the collapse of civilization in order to fully appreciate the book. We’ve had several near collapses since I purchased The Sundial–Y2K, the end of the Mayan Calendar, various planetary alignments, wars, pestilences, George W. Bush elected twice–but something about recent events conjures more serious reflection on the End Times than all those others.

The Sundial is focused on the coming End of the World–or, more exactly, how people respond when they genuinely believe the End is nigh. The setting is a genteel massive manse in a New England town, built a generation previously by some fabulously wealthy businessman and currently inhabited by his two children and his grandson’s widow and daughter. The children are Mr. Halloran, confined to a wheelchair and in evident decline, and his sister Aunt Fanny. Mr. Halloran’s wife is still around as well, and is suspected by the grandson’s widow and granddaughter of having murdered his son by pushing him down the stairs in order to secure her own inheritance of the house.

Aunt Fanny one early morning takes a walk around the gardens she’s known since childhood, becoming somehow lost and suffering a potent vision of her father telling her the end is nigh, but that those inside his house will be saved to repopulate the Earth. What ensues is pure hilarity. Fanny shares her vision and somehow it becomes doctrine with all those trapped inside. They will be Robinson Crusoes and Noahs and Adams and Eves, left stranded to rebuild and repopulate.

As in every Jackson novel the characters are all delightfully awful and are skewered by her sharp sensibilities. The dialogue is funnier and better and more sophisticated than anything in Dorothy Parker, the wit makes Evelyn Waugh seem amateurish, and Dickens himself would have been awed by Jackson’s ability to lampoon class differences so efficiently. What took him 5 or 6 hundred pages takes her much less than 3.

I note that as we pass from Pisces and into Aquarius that the old gods have all lined up to watch our current collapse. The Planet Parade of late February/early March this year showed them all coming back to witness our decline once again into rebirth and renewal, just as the change from Aries to Pisces saw the cratering of all the great Mediterranean civilizations and the birth of new orders. In Jackson’s novel the end doesn’t matter so much as the way people behave anticipating it. And just as she predicted, they behave shamelessly and hilariously so–Buckle up, folks!

Everyman

I’ve been going back through the physical library and pulling down unread volumes lately. In the last six months four of those have been novels by Philip Roth.

Roth wrote Everyman shortly before killing off his alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman in Exit Ghost. I think Everyman is a superior novel and a more beautiful meditation on mortality and death than Exit Ghost.

The novel opens with the death of the main character, who remains unnamed throughout the story. We attend his funeral with some family and some former lovers, and then we are inside the mind of the dead man as he projects backward in time. I believe this is only the second novel I’ve read where the entire story is told from the point of view of a dead dude, the other being The Living End by the delightful Stanley Elkin.

The narrator worked in the ad biz but always wanted to be a painter. We see his triumphs and failures and his major regrets. We meet his children and his three wives and some of his lovers. We encounter his parents and siblings, and the theme which ties everything together is decay and death and their inevitability. Hence the title Everyman, because no one escapes death, and as a result the book is basically about all of us. Perhaps we get to buzz back through and revisit our time here after we go to our final rest? It’s a comforting thought.

There is a beautiful scene where the narrator visits his parents’ graves in a dilapidated cemetery in an unsafe part of New Jersey before going in for a surgery he does not survive. He meets the gravedigger and there is a beautiful moment between the two men, one whose living is digging holes for the dead, and one who is about to die. The scene’s got “Alas, poor Yorick” chops.

Roth was a substantial artist and a chronicler of the USA in the decades leading up to its decline into irrelevance and buffoonery. He confronted his end with dignity and continued to work until his final moments. I am grateful to have his novels as a roadmap to my own final decades.

Jillian

This book is awful. When I write that I’m not speaking at all of the quality of the novel–it’s actually quite good and very entertaining. But everything about it is truly terrible. Jillian is a troublingly accurate record of life in the current late-stage neoliberal capitalist hellscape we all inhabit. As such, it’s an abyss of despair, a Nietszchean vortex, a singularly piercing examination of approaching Singularity. I laughed heartily reading it, and cringed each time I laughed, because ‘funny, not funny.’

The novel centers on two characters: Megan, a recent college grad who works in a gastroenterologist’s office. Her job is to look at images of people’s colons all day as she scans the images into their medical files. She is alienated from her labor, but also from her friends, from her boyfriend, from her family, from her society, and from herself. Marx wrote Grundrisse just for Megan. She sees how empty everything is and how difficult it will be to find meaning at all in a life doomed to this sort of work. As a result she gets smashed on canned American beer and smokes too many cigarettes while becoming more and more of an intolerable asshole. Megan is infuriated that nobody else can see how fake everything is and how their successes at their own fake shitty jobs are contemptible.

And then there is Jillian, Megan’s co-worker. Jillian is about a decade older than Megan and because unconsciously Megan sees herself becoming Jillian in ten years, still working at the doctor’s office, still cheerfully scanning poopy intestinal images, she starts to really loathe her coworker and herself. Half the novel is from Jillian’s point of view, half from Megan’s (with brief moments from the POV of a few other scattered characters, including Jillian’s son Adam and from a dog, a bird, a racoon).

Jillian is a total wreck, and drives on a suspended license because she is completely deluded about the state of her world and unable to face the realities of her situation. A single mom who got knocked up after hooking up at a club while high, she has discovered religion and has made a mess of that as well. After drifting thoughtlessly through a red light her car gets impounded, she is arrested and arraigned, and she has to rely on the kindness of a fellow church member to get her kid to daycare every day while she goes to the office. Megan sees through all of Jillian’s bullshit and it makes her totally crazy. She goes home and obsesses about Jillian to the point her boyfriend starts to get annoyed by this obsession.

Meanwhile Jillian has lied to her employer about her car and about an upcoming court date and about her fine for driving on an expired license. And to solve all her problems she adopts a dog because happy families have dogs, right? Then a painkiller addiction makes everything that much better.

In this novel we get to experience the collapse into despair of these miserably entwined people. And what makes it all worse is that Megan, despite being a terrible asshole, is actually correct about the people around her and the society she is in and about her prospects. And she is correct about Jillian and her thin cheerful veneer, the inevitable collapse of which affects not only herself but her child and her dog and Megan and the entire society they are trapped inside. And yet these are the sort of people churned out and crushed by America the Beautiful in the 21st century.

…the merciless encounter between the no-longers and the not-yets

I made another trip down to the public events space in our building where most of my books are currently housed and pulled a half-dozen unread titles off the shelves. The book I intended to read first I placed on the coffee table, then went off to complete some errands and returned to find my wife 10 pages in and engrossed. So I grabbed another off the pile.

Exit Ghost is the last of Roth’s Zuckerman novels. Nathan has lost his mojo literally after a bout with prostate cancer. Impotent and incontinent, he has retreated to the Berkshires and lived in isolation for 11 years–part of this history was recounted in The Human Stain. While living in his cabin by a swampy pond Zuckerman has focused entirely on his work and further cemented his reputation as a literary master. He doesn’t watch the news, doesn’t read the paper, doesn’t use the internet–he’s become completely detached from the world. But the promise of a medical procedure which might fix his urinary incontinence draws him back to the New York he’d abandoned. A chance encounter with a woman he knew briefly decades before, compounded by the mistake of buying the current New York Review of Books and seeing an intriguing advert in the the Classifieds section threatens to involve Zuckerman in a literary controversy involving his favorite writer. After more than a decade out of the game, Zuckerman finds himself unwillingly pulled back into an imbroglio.

Like Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, Exit Ghost is an exploration of history and memory. What should be recorded for posterity, and what can remain unsaid and unmemorialized? Who is a reliable recorder of events? How fallable exactly is memory and how biased? And as one ages, these questions become more immediate and profound.

Nathan Zuckerman of course served as the fictional alter-ego to Roth through several novels across several decades. The early works were full of intense and zesty voice and delighted in experience and the savors of life. The later works develop in craft and profundity and seriousness and serve as powerful documents and indictments of various eras in US political and cultural history.

Exit Ghost is not Roth at the height of his powers. He is putting to rest and tying up the world his alter-ego inhabits, and giving us a glimpse of his own writerly process along the way, as Zuckerman notes his own rapidly failing memory and tries desperately to record his conversations and then to create fictional dialogues using them. An author renowned for his breathless writing about sex and desire finds himself droopily noodling around young women he can no longer seduce because of his age and decaying physique.

I enjoyed the novel a great deal mostly because I could see a lot of myself in its pages. I’ve stopped reading news almost entirely after a life devoted to being informed. I’ve become cantankerous about the internet and social media and refuse to use AI programs (though I’m aware AI is now powering and manipulating other platforms I’ve used for years). I live in an old factory in a rural area and hope to have time at some point to do more reading and writing and serious study. After decades of glorious city living I find cities exhausting for more than a day or two, and prefer a quiet sedate life to the continuous glamor of going out multiple times a week. Hopefully I avoid the other problems Zuckerman experiences, but as my mother says when I tell her about knee or neck or back problems: “All of that just gets worse.”

Another enjoyable aspect of the novel is to read Zuckerman/Roth thinking about writers who were important: Dostoevsky, Hardy, the Bronte sisters, Conrad, Plimpton, Mailer. Zuckerman and some older characters bemoan the state of the world for mercilessly finding fault with Faulkner and Hemingway and banishing their work from the canon for personal failings. Young characters are keen to find those faults in previous generations and expose their sins. Zuckerman exits an exasperated ghost indeed.

The Corrections

Here’s another novel from the recent NY Times List of “Greatest Books of the 21st Century.” It’s almost 600 pages long, and, given how weighty and dense and serious it is as a work of fiction I was surprised to find the writing quite breezy. I laughed heartily several times and regretted my decision 20-odd years ago to classify Jonathan Franzen as merely one of a crop of young writers at the time whose voices and themes and styles all seemed indistinguishable to me: Safran-Foer, Lethem, Chabon, Schteyngart, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed The Corrections.

I must however admit that the family at the center of the novel is deeply troubling. Most of the characters are eminently likeable and relatable–I found much in the family interactions which was all-too-familiar from my own experiences. And yet every character does hateful, despicable, awful things. Again, pretty typical of my experience not only of my own family but also of others I know well. This is where the sophistication of the book lies: documenting a time period in US/world history via the lives of a single midwestern family teetering on the brink of total and utter disarray and giving us a full picture of why across three generations. Franzen’s book shows us lovable people who we want to care for despite how truly terribly they behave–and given where American society has gone since its publication there is a bit of prescience in his vision. The entire nation these days feels like a dysfunctional family full of badly behaving people who are at heart decent and reasonable but whose unpredictable, selfish, and greedy behavior makes them despicable.

This morning I read an essay by Wallace Shawn in the NY Review of Books. The essay, called The End of a Village, will serve as the introduction to a newly re-issued book about the Vietnam War. Shawn was a college pal of the author Jonathan Schell, and manages to paint an evocative portrait of his friend and what he hoped to achieve through reporting on The Village of Ben Suc. Schell observed the complete and utter destruction of a peasant village by US forces, and tried to portray both the victims of this assault and the perpetrators with as much objectivity as he could muster. Having just finished The Corrections, I was struck when Shawn wrote this about Schell: “He generally seemed to like the military men he encountered. It’s just that what they were doing was appalling.”

This of course leads us to Hannah Arendt in The New Yorker 50-some years ago and her “banality of evil” (Wallace Shawn’s dad was managing editor of The New Yorker at the time). Shawn makes the connection, stating “If one accepts the idea that the ugliest of crimes can by perpetrated by people who aren’t ugly criminals, then the possibility seems to arise that even reasonably nice people might be at times involved in evil.”

The characters in The Corrections do horrible things as their family dangles by a frayed thread over the abyss of the 21st century. But at different parts of the novel, told from their different perspectives, I found myself rooting for each of them and caring deeply about their situations despite the decisions they made. And if individuals can do horrible things despite being “good” people, then so of course can societies and nations.

So we all make poor decisions and we all allow questionable motivations to drive us now and again. But how do we fix things after? When we go catastrophically awry and cause catastrophe, what is the means of repair? The word corrections has a lush ambiguity because the word has so many applications. A teacher corrects her student’s work. Parents correct their children (well, ideally). Some behavior is considered correct, and society drills us in the niceties of acceptable interactions. A captain who discovers her ship is off course will make corrections, a market which is overheated will face an inevitable correction. All of these senses of the word have a similar basis but different nuances. Every generation goes through a reaction to what was considered correct by the previous, now aging members of a family or civilization. So what is correct can be in flux, and those doing the correcting can be wrong or misled or mal-informed. When everything is called into question, when religion, government, the media, when public institutions previously held in high regard, when family itself all face skeptical and factual analysis and are thereby doubted and eventually shorn of their importance, and when much of the traditional underpinnings of a society and its very history are demonstrated as false and hypocritical, what is left? Where can we turn for guidance and support? How do we rebuild? I guess we’ll find out together.

The Human Stain

I read a lot of Roth back in the ’90s, to the point where I found myself Zuckered out. When The Human Stain arrived I bought it in hardcover but never got around to reading it (my copy still has a “Borders Books 30% off sticker” on the cover, LOL). Recently the NY Times released their Best Books of the Century list; the novel’s inclusion sent me downstairs to dig it out.

The Human Stain is third in a trilogy of novels (the previous two are American Pastoral and I Married a Communist). There’s a twenty-some year gap between my readings of Volume 2 and Volume 3!

Roth is typically strong at recreating a time period of American political and cultural absurdities, which he’d done in the previous novels in the trilogy for earlier eras. As the title and timing of the novel might indicate, we’re in the era of Bill Clinton and Monica’s stained blue dress. What a terrible time to be alive and American! Moralizing hypocrites unbound, a sleazy and easily manipulated Chief Executive who fell for a honey trap even the bait didn’t understand, the rise of sensationalist and salacious cable ‘news’ coverage, etc. Out of that mess came an extreme and reactionary right-wing movement angry that Clinton out-triangulated them and co-opted their economic wish list to the point where he hammered through the final achievements of the Reagan Revolution. As the Democrats moved right wing economically the Republicans went wholly off the rails. A Democratic Party beholden to Wall St and corporate interests emerged, leaving the political left in the US nobody to support except for the occasional quaint New Deal Dem who got smoked in the primaries or a third-party candidate. What a joke all that was, and yet the consequences were dire and are yet to be resolved in the USA.

The Human Stain centers around (SPOILER ALERT) a Black academic who chose to pass for white and Jewish and pulled it off, who is fired from his position of Dean for using a racist expression while teaching at a small elite liberal arts college in the wilds of New England. But the slur was not necessarily a slur given its ambiguities and the context, and perhaps the firing was an unreasonable rush to judgment (Roth perceived the emerging phenomenon of cancel culture?). Nathan Zuckerman, who befriends the fired prof and former Dean central to the story, sets out to untangle the events leading up to the situation and to write a book.

My favorite Roth novels feature a manic, hilarious, and zesty narrator. If you’ve read Sabbath’s Theater or Portnoy’s Complaint you know what I mean. Those novels breeze by in a vortex of delicious voice, and the reader is ensconced enchantingly in the conscience of a pervert who participates vividly in experience and has things to think about. But this novel (like The Plot Against America) succeeds on its level of refined craft. It brings up big themes, big ideas, big hypocrisies, and the reader is forced to examine her own beliefs and assumptions.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

I bought this Bantam mass market paperback at the B. Dalton Booksellers shop in Hunt Valley Mall, probably around 1985 or ’86. At the time I’d read a lot of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy but I was beginning to push out and explore other stuff. Not that the sci-fi, horror, and fantasy weren’t satisfying, but I wanted something else. The reason for this was due partially to reading a bit of Dickens, Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Harper Lee, William Golding, and Hemingway in school. What mostly made me crave more ‘literary’ fare was Samuel R. Delany and his novel Dhalgren.

Dhalgren is supposed to be a sci-fi novel, and it is, but it was actually the first absolutely confounding and densely packed work of serious artistic and philosophic intention (what would later be called a “Post-Modern novel”) that I’d ever read. I had a couple different jobs at the time and I used my money to buy records and books (I should have bought shares in Apple, but WTFK back then?). I was drawn to Dhalgren by its spectacular cover and its length–I’d recently finished a couple Dostoevsky novels and this one was like Bros. K long; and that first sentence!

to wound the autumnal city.

I went all-in. The plot? Simple. Guy walks around a post-apocalyptic urban hell-scape. Keeps a notebook, writes poetry. Gets laid a lot, men and women. There are parties and things are collapsed but people still host dinners in their apartments. But inside the text are other texts inserted in strange places, and featuring different events and characters and settings than the novel narrative itself. But, since these were also in the novel narrative, despite being kind of asides and or comments or edits or revisions or re-imaginings of the primary action, I assumed they must be important also. Were these excerpts from the protagonist’s notebook? Who knew for sure, but probably. At one point the narrator sees himself in the mirror and describes what he sees and what he describes is the author of the novel, and my mind just went soaring. I read all the Delany novels I could get–Babel-17, Nova, Triton, The Einstein Intersection. But then I got to the Tales of Neveryon series and couldn’t cut it. I saw Stars in My Pocket when it came out and bought it, thinking I’d read it in 1986 0r 1987. And now in France I pulled that same mass market off my bookshelves and read it after nearly 40 years. When was the last time I read a mass market paperback?! LOL the text is so tiny. And of course due to age the book was yellowed and crumbly despite being unread.

I really liked it a lot. There are similarities to Dhalgren and the novel has aged well. I mean here in the early 80s Delany has imagined the Web, and called it the Web, and there are many interesting questions raised about what constitutes gender and who is really male and female despite their genitalia, and there are difficulties with meaning and visual representation of language and how gestures and utterances between species and races become confused for multiple reasons. It’s a surprising series of accurate predictions of the near-future from the perspective of the 1980s but imagined FAR in the future. Again, like in Dhalgren, there is not much plot, but there is a lot of meat packed onto this skeleton. It starts off with a kind of reverse Frederick Douglass–a kid on the fringes who undergoes a treatment to render him “less anxious” and a bit incapacitated intellectually, knowing that following this treatment he will become a slave. But he undergoes the treatment and we join him as he is exploited but doesn’t really care because his brain has been altered. But a set of special finger rings attached to a Web database, provided by a female kidnapper who uses him for sex, give him a taste of what he’s missed and then the story takes off.

I’d recommend it, but not as the first Delany you read. Get to know him first!

The Childhood of Jesus

Way back in the day–early ’90s–I was earning my first master’s degree at Temple U. Ostensibly a creative writing program, Temple also required some rather rigorous literary work. There was, for example, an enormous list of “books you should read before your 2 years here is up.” On that list were three books by Coetzee: Disgrace, The Life & Times of Michael K, and Waiting for the Barbarians. I was floored by these novels, how simple and elegant they seemed, but there was so much artful architecture supporting and obscuring dense layers of meaning. One of the courses I took assigned Coetzee alongside the short fiction of Nadime Gordimer.

And then, for more than 30 years, I kept my eye on Coetzee and often thought I should pick up something again–I even bought a couple of his novels and put them on the shelf. I think I bought The Childhood of Jesus more than 6 years ago before I finally read it. It was worth the wait.

When I had writerly aspirations as a youth and I’d get stuck in the glue trap of writer’s block, I’d think of a myth or fable or religious story I’d learned as a kid and re-tell it in a different time and setting. Coetzee’s novel reminded me of that useful trick as it retells the story of Christ’s early years but with migrants entering an unnamed Latin country to start a new life. The child David is of uncertain heritage and receives the name David from authorities in his new home. He is guarded by Simon, who took care of David after he lost a letter explaining his presence on a passenger boat, and who resolves to find David’s mother in their new land. Later on other familiar characters emerge but with different names: Ines is the virgin mother, Juan is the Baptist, Magdalene and Anne and other saints and apostles emerge, drop hints about their roles, and disappear.

David speaks and writes his own language, has his own ideas about how the world should work, and struggles with authority and limits on freedom. He learns to read from a child’s version of Don Quixote’s adventures, and cannot abide the idea that Quixote’s story is only in Quixote’s head, and that others around him see the same events in different and more mundane ways. He has mystical visions about numbers and their true meaning and sees people as tiny insects trying to be visible to him as he soars above the world. There are hints that Coetzee wants to underline the merging of early Christian thought and Greek philosophy and the knowledge and symbology of esoteric wisdom schools (for example, a Micky Mouse cartoon features Plato instead of Pluto as Micky’s canine companion). David’s revolutionary pedigree is underlined by his own dog’s name: Bolivar.

The expectations of the society in which David finds himself are too constraining and when the authorities determine he should be placed in a reform school the family of David flee to start a new life.

I enjoyed it so much that now I’m bound to read the rest of the Trilogy (or is it a Trinity?). Of course, it may take me another 30 years to get to the next volume.

Blood on the Forge

Sometimes going through my own bookcases is like browsing a great used bookshop, and a volume pops out that I didn’t even know I’d purchased. Ironically, William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge was a book I was searching for several years ago without knowing it and I had it all along.

When I was a teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools I was imagining a Great Migration unit starting with an image exploration and analysis using Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series as a starter. It was a fave tactic of mine to start units with images and to teach kids how to make inferences, ask deep questions, interpret, connect to previous knowledge, make predictions, etc before even learning about the topic of the unit. I never wrote that unit, however, because the Lewis Museum in Baltimore had a show of Jacob Lawrence which included works featuring Toussaint L’Ouverture and John Brown and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. After seeing that show, because I already taught units about Brown and Douglass, I took the Jacob Lawrence idea and tacked it onto those units.

Another reason I decided not to create the Great Migration unit was because I didn’t have a meaty novel-length text to use. And yet I did have the perfect one–and didn’t realize it until I lived in rural France in the 2nd year of not being a teacher. Oh well. There is probably a bit too much prostitution in the novel for 8th graders anyhow!

William Attaway is unfortunately not well-known, though he had a profound cultural impact. Until I read his novel and its fine introduction by Darryl Pinckney I was unaware that Attaway wrote the “Banana Boat Song” for his friend Harry Belafonte. He also influenced Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, who both knew him and read this searing white-hot novel. (Side note: Darryl Pinckney has a fine article in the current NYRB about the Harlem Renaissance, and Attaway was apparently an indifferent and bored school student until he read a poem by Langston Hughes and found out that Hughes was Black, at which point he devoted himself to writing).

So, Blood on the Forge–talk about going forth and forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race! This is an incredibly vital document of an important era in US history, the great movement of Black laborers from the South to Northern cities as the industrial revolution took off. Attaway, who was a middle-class son of a teacher and doctor who himself migrated as a child from Mississippi to Chicago, weaves in all the complex societal strands into a short elegant and harrowing story. You’ve got urban/rural, White/Black (Slav/Irish), union/scab, capitalist/socialist, agrarian/industrial, modern/traditional. There is enormous violence and powerful interests interfere in everything to protect what they regard as theirs, and the fates of three sharecropper brothers who are recruited and taken north to Pennsylvania to the steel mills herald prophetically the racial and class tensions to come. HIGHLY recommended.

Warlock by Oakley Hall

I adore the NYRB re-issues–high quality paperbacks with great cover design and kick-ass introductions

When it comes to fiction genres, I’ve got my faves. As a young dude those were horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. Over the years I drifted away from all of these only to check in now and again on the hot new thang. Occasionally I’ve dabbled in mystery/thriller stuff, but never have I been a reader of Westerns (unless one includes Cormac McCarthy in that category).

I bought a remaindered copy of Warlock probably 20 years back and only just pulled it down off the shelf. Glad I did, because it’s a banger! Like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven it’s a rather sophisticated deconstruction of the myths associated with the American West and gunslingers and cowboys. The hero of the story has a morally ambiguous past and when hired to be Marshall of Warlock struggles with the ethics of his situation. Is he a murderer for hire, or a representative of law and order? What is a government other than an agency dictating behavior via the threat extreme violence? Can citizens have a sense of peace and freedom without a killer to back up those ideals? How is a hired gun who kills to keep the peace different from a blackguard who kills to take money from a stagecoach?

The novel features some historical figures and also transposes mythic characters from the OK Corral into thinly disguised avatars. There are IWW prototypes working the mines and rebelling against brutal treatment, there are cross-border skirmishes between cattle rustlers in the US and Mexico, there are Apaches, there is the US Cavalry and a half-crazed senile general. Whores, saloon keepers, merchants, deputies, judges, and rugged outlaws eek out a living in a land where law is dictated by force and mob rule. There is the outlaw turned deputy who, like the hero, tries to do the right thing but cannot always navigate the complexities of the myriad relationships and power struggles. And there is revenge; a LOT of revenge.

The novel surprised me often by subverting standard genre tropes familiar from TV and film. The writing was elegant and Oakley Hall created engaging and multifaceted characters and situated them in an intricately detailed setting.

My one critique involves a love scene which descends into bodice-ripper cliché. But overall I thought Warlock was excellent and it pulled me inevitably to its satisfying conclusion. Thomas Pynchon called it one of America’s greatest novels–it’s certainly better than anything he wrote (excepting perhaps The Crying of Lot 49).