Western Book Roundup

For some time I’ve noticed that the majority of the books submitted to me for review are written by men, a ratio I’d estimate at five books by men for every one book by a woman. I noticed this discrepancy particularly among the big six publishers—very few of the books set in the West produced by major publishers are written by women. I am more likely to find books written by women from small and academic presses. I wondered if this male dominance was just a Western thing.

As I read and enjoyed books regardless of the gender of their authors, I also noticed a disturbing trend, a formula that Western books by major publishers included again and again: a depiction of horses plus violence against women in books written by men. Usually these authors are compared to Cormac McCarthy, either in the blurbs or the jacket copy. I realize it weakens my argument not to mention these books by name, but I don’t want to single out anybody, because I think each writer chose to use these elements for personal, artistic reasons, and I don’t blame any of them for it. But I just may have been a wee bit crankier in my reviews of these books.

I began to dread reading books with horses on the cover. Sure, on the outside, it’s all the pretty horses, but on the inside it’s going to be all the beaten, cowering women.

Also in the Roundup: Denver Center Theatre Company to adapt Helen Thorpe’s Just Like Us, Books Editor Tom Walker leaves the Denver Post, David Abrams writes about the thriving Idaho literary scene, and Casper College hosts its Humanities Fest.

New West Book Review

Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains
By Ruth McLaughlin
University of Oklahoma Press, 184 pages,

In her tough and moving memoir Bound Like Grass, Ruth McLaughlin records her family’s history of farming wheat and cattle in Culbertson, Montana, near the North Dakota border. This book serves as an elegy and a monument—without it, there would be no remaining sign of the family’s Montana existence, and few, if anyone, would remember McLaughlin’s two deceased sisters. McLaughlin’s grandparents homesteaded in eastern Montana, her parents continued farming in a mode of spectacular frugality and grim defeat, and McLaughlin and her three siblings grew up there in the ‘50s and ‘60s, only to put as much ground between them and Culbertson as possible.

McLaughlin’s single surviving sibling, Dwight, headed to California the first chance he got, but Ruth, who now lives in Great Falls, was more bound to the land, visiting regularly even after her parents died, until someone bought the property and burned down all the structures, effectively erasing all signs that their family had ever been there. As McLaughlin puts it, “Our family had a ninety-seven-year fling here; now we are gone. Ten have been left behind, including six children, planted in two cemeteries.”

Ruth McLaughlin will read at Chapter One Books in Hamilton, Mont. on March 30.

A New Take on Old West Lit

Old West or New West, our novels tend to get categorized by subject. Mountain man novels, ranch novels, cowboy novels, Indian novels, pioneer novels, historical novels, homestead novels—the list goes on and on. Once in awhile this leads to confusion, like talking about books in a Wyoming saloon and saying that Annie Proulx wrote a cowboy novel. Ooops.

Which are the best of the cowboy novels? I don’t know. (I can’t tell you which of my kids I like best, either.) Here are five important ones:

1. Owen Wister’s The Virginian

You know the classic shootout in the street, good guy and bad guy facing each other with sixguns? It became a cliché, but it began in The Virginian.
The Virginian demonstrated that you could have a darn good cowboy book with no cows in it. It has long discussions of democracy and aristocracy, but there’s also romantic sparks flying between The Virginian and the schoolteacher Molly Wood. There’s good humor, too, such as The Virginian’s story about the cowboys who gave up cattle to raise frogs for eastern restaurants.

New West Book Review

Old Border Road
by Susan Froderberg
Little, Brown and Company, 292 pages, $23.99

In her first novel Old Border Road, set amid an epic drought in a small town near the Arizona/Mexico border, Susan Froderberg uses striking, poetic language to convey the parched landscape and internal stagnation of the narrator, seventeen-year-old Katherine. Katherine, who is almost always referred to as Girl, marries a young man named Son. Son turns out to be a chronic womanizer, heading to town to carouse and leaving Girl home with her mother-in-law Rose and her father-in-law, whom she calls Rose’s Daddy, in an old adobe house where the four live together on a ranch. The stripped-down character names are a clue to Froderberg’s aim to tell an elemental story of desiccating weather and thwarted dreams.

New West Poetry Book Review

Bone Light
by Orlando White
Red Hen Press, 64 pages, $15.95

When I heard the title of Orlando White‘s first book of poetry, Bone Light, and learned that White was a Navajo poet who had grown up on the Navajo Reservation near Tolikan, Arizona, I wanted to connect this intriguing juxtaposition of words in this title to the austere landscapes that I associate with Navajo country. I naively imagined something like a Georgia O’Keefe painting, maybe a ghostly skull of some buffalo hovering over a distant mesa.

What I found inside the pages of Bone Light, however, was a poetry that unsettled the sort of easy assumptions about the relationship between poetry and identity that my first musings on the title had inspired. White’s tightly focused poetry is devoid of the representations of landscape and the coherent sense of “rooted” identity they are often associated with in the poetry of the Southwest. 

Book Excerpt

Tim Sullivan has reported for several western newspapers and magazines, including The Salt Lake Tribune and The Oregonian, and now works as an urban planner and designer. A native of Salt Lake City, he currently lives in Oakland, California. The following is an excerpt from the preface of Sullivan’s book No Communication with the Sea: Searching for an Urban Future in the Great Basin (University of Arizona Press, 240 pages, $19.95).

The Great Basin, that vast, dry hole in America, is not often associated with great cities. It’s understandable. The region is the most sparsely inhabited in the continental United States. The cities at its edges, chiefly the metropolitan regions surrounding Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno, Nevada, are regarded as overgrown mining camps, Wild-West theme parks, zealous religious colonies, or—worst of all—bland American suburbia. The lore of the Great Basin, instead, is gleaned from its exoticism, from its differences from the rest of the country: the unbounded freedom, the space, the natural resources, and the scenery. The Basin has the loneliest road in America, bombing ranges and chemical incineration plants, and the legendary steep-and-deep skiing made possible by its strange hydrography.

But great cities are possible here. They’d better be.

New West Book Review

In one story in Cheyenne Madonna, Eddie Chuculate’s wry and winning debut collection, Jordan Coolwater, the Creek/Cherokee protagonist of the book, sits with his girlfriend in Santa Fe’s plaza, selling handmade jewelry. “Tourists from New Zealand, Australia, or the U.K. would make the most braindead comments,” he explains, “wondering aloud where they ‘might find all the buffalo and teepees,’ or ‘Where does the Trail of Tears start?” Such is the life of an Indian artist, which Chuculate depicts with wit, candor, and warmth. Jordan comes from a family that includes several artists, and one day this will also be his career, in between alcoholic benders and a stint in jail.

The book begins with the O. Henry Prize winning story “Galveston Bay, 1826,” which functions as a sort of prologue to the six Jordan Coolwater stories that follow. A band of four Cheyenne men make their way south on horseback to Galveston Bay to visit the ocean for the first time. “This wasn’t a war party or a scouting trip,” Chuculate writes, “This was plain-and-simple joyriding.” As they approach the ocean, they befriend the local Indians by offering their chief a horse. They enjoy seafood and taste the ocean’s salty water, but soon decide to ditch the remainder of their new friends’ all-night dance party and return home.

Book Excerpt

For 26 years, Carter Niemeyer worked for USDA Animal Damage Control in Montana, where he was a trapper, a district supervisor, and the West’s wolf management specialist. He retired in 2006 from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as the federal wolf recovery coordinator for Idaho. The following is an excerpt from his new memoir Wolfer (BottleFly Press, 374 pages, $17.99). Niemeyer’s speaking engagements are listed on his website.

Once the shine of reintroduction had worn off, the troubles between people and wolves resumed, each living up to their worst traits.

After returning from a trip to Albuquerque, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was wrestling with problems related to Mexican wolves, there was more trouble in the Ninemile: this time on a ranch in Huson, Montana, owned by actress Andie MacDowell.

BOOK REVIEW

Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
By Judy Pasternak
317 pages, Free Press, 2010

The deserts of the American West were about as far-removed from the battlefields of World War II as any place could be, but they played a key role in the war, and in shaping the atomic age that followed.

The first nuclear mushroom cloud rose over the Trinity bombsite in New Mexico. The uranium used for the nuclear bombs was processed in Colorado and Utah. Some of the ore that provided the uranium came from Utah and New Mexico, particularly the Navajo Reservation. The Manhattan Project may have been based in New York, but its work was carried out in the West.

Navajos famously provided their language for the war cause, their code talkers turning their mother tongue into a code undecipherable by the Axis. But the Navajos who remained at home working in the uranium mines also became unexpected war victims, beginning a toxic legacy that has plagued the tribe ever since.

In the annals of the Cold War, the Navajos are the forgotten victims, but they paid a heavy price for the nuclear escalation that brought the world’s superpowers to the brink of mutual annihilation.

In her book Yellow Dirt, former Los Angeles Times reporter Judy Pasternak presents the horrific story of Navajos and the uranium mines that were bored into the earth beneath their mesas and buttes – a landscape considered sacred to them. It is a story of environmental destruction, and yet another tale of betrayal of American Indians. It’s a heartbreaking story, and Pasternak tells it masterfully.

New West Book Review

Best of the West 2010: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas & D. Seth Horton
University of Texas Press, 246 pages, $19.95

Kent Meyers‘ insightful foreword, “Why All the Law?” is one of the best pieces in the 2010 edition of the recently revived annual anthology of Western short fiction, Best of the West. Meyers makes a cogent argument about what distinguishes Western American literature from any other regional literature. Meyers writes, “the outlaw has a peculiar relationship to Western American literature.” Often in Western lit, the outlaw is a “royal” figure, somehow deposed from power and left to make his existence on the outskirts of society. Meyers compares this glorification of outlaws to the tendency of some Western people to try to free themselves from the reach of law, taxes, and other trappings of government, as did Warren Jeffs. “The West makes promises to fictional kings,” Meyers writes, “it offers resources of space and land and solitude.”

Meyers’ conclusion seems eerily prescient in light of the recent assassination attempt against Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona: “Literary authors find, as well as invent, their stories. In the American West, those stories often spring out of a concern with how the individual, so easily tempted toward moral solipsism, manages, or doesn’t, to stay connected to the needs of others, and so keeps from becoming a law unto himself. If an examination of these forces is what Western writers tend toward, it’s a gift the nation needs right now as it struggles with the conundrum of remaining true to its own laws while facing those who would not merely break the law but destroy it.”