Doc by Mary Doria Russell

Published by Random House on May 3, 2011

Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp are firmly established in the pantheon of Wild West legends, along with Jesse James and Billy the Kid. So many books have been written about them, fiction and nonfiction, that it may seem surprising to find another novel based on one of these gunslingers. It must be their legendary status that draws the attention of writers. Widespread familiarity with the legend becomes the writer's base, and the chance to reinvent or reinterpret an icon has an undeniable appeal. In Doc, Russell embraces the challenge of making the familiar seem new with surprising success.

Behind every legend there's a person, and it is the person, not the gunfighter, that Mary Doria Russell imagines in her story of Doc Holliday's time in Dodge City. Russell underplays the novel's armed confrontations, taking note of how legends build, how tall tales grow: an incident involving six cowboys evolves in the telling until Holliday faces down two dozen. Ultimately Russell deconstructs the legend, deemphasizing Holliday's skills as a gunfighter/gambler while painting a detailed picture of a loquacious, consumptive dentist who seems always a step away from death. The plot, such as it is, involves the apparent murder of an entirely fictitious character, a friend of Holliday and Wyatt Earp, but the mystery of his death is merely a vehicle to drive a deeper story. It isn't the familiar story of the O.K. Corral and Wyatt Earp's confrontation with the Clantons; the novel makes reference to those events in a concluding chapter, but the story effectively ends in Dodge City, before the Earp brothers and Holliday make their way to Tombstone.

Russell begins with an eyeblink view of John Holliday's Civil War childhood and his brief but violent stay in Texas (where he killed a man and was shot by another). By the time Holliday decides to rebuild his tubercular life in Dodge City, he's taken up with Kate, a princess turned prostitute who entrances him with erudition that matches his own. Kate is a significant figure in Holliday's life and in the novel. Kate's affinity for Holliday is based in part on his ability to win large sums of money at the card tables, in part on his intelligence and education, and in part on her inability to understand him. Unlike the other men in her considerable experience, who "were as obvious and as easily dealt with as a phallus," the complex dentist becomes her most memorable lover. To Kate's dismay, it is Doc Holliday's dentistry, not his gambling, that fills him with pride and purpose. Russell portrays Holliday as a compassionate if ill-tempered man who treats the fictitious characters "China Joe" and John Horse Sanders with respect regardless of their race, who understands the difficult lives that drove women to work in bordellos. Russell's Holliday is a man isolated by his intelligence and southern manners as much as his illness and quick temper.

Russell's Dodge City is a lawless land of unchecked freedom, fueled by the seasonal influx of money brought by Texans driving cattle: "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." Russell populates Dodge City with fully realized characters, emphasizing the routine and drama of their daily lives rather than the excitement and rough justice of frontier life. Speaking to Morgan Earp about literature, Holliday argues that Raskolnikoff and Oliver Twist's Fagin are interesting characters because they are a mixture of good and bad. Russell's characters are interesting for the same reasons. She creates a Wyatt Earp who is filled with insecurities instilled by an abusive father. The experiences and motives that drive her politicians and villains illuminate their lives.

I can't speak to the novel's historical accuracy, although I can note that Russell, in an afterward, calls attention to a few minor changes she made in the historical record. She also lists the novel's characters, italicizing the few who are entirely fictitious. Frankly, I don't think it matters; writers of fiction are licensed to change the past for the sake of the story. Still, so far as I can tell, Rusell's novel is as true to the past as it is to the artist's purpose: to tell truths even when they are fictional. Doc is a wise and stirring and truthful novel about a hard, determined, complicated man.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Hanging Wood by Martin Edwards

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on April 5, 2011 

Orla Payne, seemingly a bit whacky (or at least a tad drunk) jumps into a silo in the apparent belief that it will help her solve a mystery. Her body is later found buried in grain. The day before she jumped, Orla begged Hannah Scarlett to investigate the disappearance of Orla's brother, Callum Hinds, twenty years earlier, when Orla was seven and Calum was fourteen. Scarlett works with the Cold Case Review Team at Cumbria Constabulary. Soon after Calum's disappearance (and the simultaneous disappearance of his uncle's pig), his uncle, Philip Hinds, hung himself in the Hanging Wood, an act widely viewed as an admission of responsibility for Calum's death. Although Philip was the last person who saw Calum, no evidence of Philip's role in Calum's disappearance was ever found. Scarlett tackles the mystery with the help of historian Daniel Kind. As the story progresses, another person dies and someone turns up who appears to have a long-lost connection to the Hinds family.

Martin Edwards sets up the usual range of diversionary suspects, giving Scarlett and one of her detectives a chance to muck around in the lives of the upper crust Lake District residents. Some of the people they interview repeat information provided by others; the redundancy tends to slow the narrative flow. In fact, much of the story is carried by exposition and dialog; in the absence of action or significant conflict, the pace lags. If the lives and relationships of the wealthy family members fail to generate much interest, neither does Scarlett's life, despite her continual fretting about her failed marriage and her critical assessment of the men who happen into her gaze. Again, the redundancy is irksome: how many times do we need to hear that the macho womanizing detective she's working with isn't her type, despite her admiration of his "powerful forearms"?

Perhaps readers who have read the previous Lake District novels will feel an attachment to the characters that I lacked and will have more interest in the mundane details of their faltering relationships. My interest lay not in the characters but in the story, which takes some interesting twists before arriving at a satisfying conclusion. Despite the uneven pace and lackluster characters, Edwards' capable prose style and plotting skills make The Hanging Wood a reasonably good yarn that dedicated mystery fans should enjoy.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Dance Lessons by Áine Greaney

Published by Syracuse University Press on April 11, 2011 

Dance Lessons is a story of hidden truths and unspoken memories.  The interwoven stories that comprise Dance Lessons begin with Ellen Boisvert, a child of French Canadian parents, and Fintan Dowd, an Irish immigrant working illegally as a Boston bartender.  They meet and marry and are near divorce when Fintan dies in a sailing accident.  At the novel’s center, however, is Fintan’s mother Jo; from her story all the others radiate.  Jo takes stoicism to a new level; she prides herself on bearing pain and misfortune. It is “bitter sacrifice that forms the core, the credo of Jo Dowd’s very existence.”  Jo sacrifices her future to wed a man chosen by her parents, a man who can live on the family farm and do the chores her aging father can no longer handle.  She sacrifices companionship when her loquacious sister moves to the city, leaving her husband and parents to settle into a “deep silence, a silence that seems to have a life of its own.”  Unable to tell Fintan that she is proud of his scholastic achievements, filled with resentment of the woman he loves, she sabotages his happiness and sacrifices the bond between parent and child.  Sacrifice has warped Jo Dowd, and that is the condition she is in when Ellen finds her -- a condition magnified by the cancer growing in her lungs.

At one point in the story, a character wonders what “terrible, awful thing” he would have to do to make his child “deny his very existence.”  That is ultimately the question Ellen seeks to answer.  After Fintan’s death, she learns that his mother is not dead, as he had always claimed, and she travels to Ireland to find Jo.  She says she wants to put her husband’s ghost to rest, but it’s never clear why she believes meeting Fintan’s mother will help her achieve that goal.  For reasons that are again unclear (particularly given her decision to end her marriage), Ellen wants to know why Fintan kept his mother’s existence a secret.  The trip to Ireland seems like a contrivance designed to introduce the reader to Jo, but that is a minor complaint given the compelling story that follows.

The narrative ultimately comes full circle, beginning and ending with Ellen.  Along the way, it jumps between the past and present:  between Jo’s deteriorating relationship with Fintan and Ellen’s discovery of the events that caused their estrangement.  We see parallels as the twin stories develop:  similarities in the behavior of Jo toward Fintan and of Fintan toward Ellen; the absence of family connection, evidenced in Jo’s household by silence and in Ellen’s by meaningless conversation at holiday dinners, family members “making noise -- words to while away the hours until everyone retreated back to his or her own world.”  As it tells these twin stories, the novel branches into other lives that have been touched by the tragedy of Fintan’s upbringing.  At some point the novel starts to read like a literary mystery, with Ellen trying to piece together Fintan’s relationships and tease out the cause of his estrangement from Jo.

Apart from Ellen, there aren’t many significant characters in Dance Lessons a reader might like.  The novel’s strength lies in its ability to make the reader understand and even empathize with unlikable people.  Ellen comes to know her husband and in so doing, comes to terms with his death, with their failed marriage, and with her grief.  In some respects, the ending, starting with a chapter that is almost an epilogue and continuing to the actual epilogue, seems false, out of synch with the rest of the novel, as if Áine Greaney felt a need to bring the storylines to a “feel good” conclusion that would please readers after exposing them to such sad and difficult lives.  At the same time, the pre-epilogue ending offers additional insight into Jo, jolting the reader with another small shock.

There are moments when the beauty of Áine Greaney’s prose dominates all else:  gently rhythmic sentences, descriptions of sights and sounds and smells that stimulate the reader’s senses.  At other times the hushed drama of futile hopes and despairing lives prevails.  Greaney makes subtle changes in the narrative voice as the novel shifts from rural to urban, from the United States to Ireland to England, from older characters to younger ones.  Both in prose style and in content, Greaney crafted a mesmerizing novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Equations of Life by Simon Morden

Published by Orbit on March 29, 2011

Simon Morden’s Equations of Life, the first book of a trilogy set in a post-Armageddon future, is an engaging, action-filled novel that has the feel of an intelligently written comic book. Samuil Petrovitch, a radiation-damaged Russian, left his criminal past behind and came to London in 2021 on a physics scholarship.  In the novel’s opening pages, Petrovich saves a young woman named Sanja from being kidnapped.  He escapes death with an assist from an armed nun named Sister Madeleine.  Sanja turns out to be the daughter of Oshicora, the boss of a yakuza-style corporate entity that is rapidly becoming the dominant criminal organization in the Metrozone. Oshicora’s real passion, however, is the creation of a virtual Japan (the physical Japan having fallen into the ocean during the Armageddon).  Sanja’s kidnappers were employed by Marchenkho, a Russian mob boss who, having been foiled in his plot to snatch Sanja, is unhappy with Petrovitch.  Petrovich is soon dodging Russian and Japanese mobsters while worrying that a police officer named Harry Chain will discover his sordid past.  Petrovich’s problems (not the least of which is a propensity for heart attacks) multiply when something called the New Machine Jihad mounts an attack on all of the Metrozone’s computer systems and manipulates Petrovich into doing its bidding.

Equations of Life tells a fun story that obviously isn’t meant to be taken seriously (that, at least, is the inference I draw from the armed nun and wisecracking antihero).  We learn little about the supporting characters, but Morden infuses Petrovich with enough personality to make him interesting.  The characters have appeared in earlier stories that Morden set in the same post-Armageddon future; I haven’t read them so I don’t know whether they give the supporting characters more context.  Exactly what happened to cause the Armageddon is also unrevealed in the novel; perhaps those facts are made known in the stories or in the remaining books in the trilogy.

While the narrative has the feel of a novel hastily written (the word “literary” will never be used in its description), the story roars along with such speed that Morden’s stylistic lapses are easily overlooked.  Sometimes the plot is a bit over-the-top (an easily won battle against a horde of zombie-like bums is the novel’s epitome of silliness) and it never feels entirely original; bits and pieces seem cobbled together from stories already told.  Yet Morden reassembles the familiar into something unique and surprising (although the ending is a bit predictable).  On the whole, Equations of Life is a satisfying novel that left me sufficiently interested in Petrovich to make me want to read the next installment.

RECOMMENDED

Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on August 19, 2008

August Brill, age 72, lives with his daughter and granddaughter. Brill is a temporary invalid, having crushed his leg in a car accident. Brill recently lost his wife; his daughter's husband left her; his granddaughter's boyfriend was recently murdered. Brill and his granddaughter spend their days watching Netflix movies (she's a film student); Brill spends his sleepless nights inventing stories. The story he invents during the course of the novel centers on a man who has been abducted from his life, transplanted to an alternative Earth where 9/11 never happened, where a civil war is claiming millions of lives. The civil war is happening because a writer (Brill) is writing about it; the abducted man is tasked with killing Brill.

As one would expect from a Paul Auster novel, Man in the Dark is elegantly written. Like most of Auster's characters, Brill is isolated, and not only (or primarily) because of his limited mobility is limited by a recent traffic accident. He has difficulty connecting with both his daughter and granddaughter; the reader suspects he had the same problem with his wife before her death. The main characters are all working their way through pain. The story Brill creates to combat his insomnia is telling: Brill seems to want to cast himself as the abducted man (relatively young, happily married) who is charged with killing the old, destructive man Brill imagines himself to have become. Ultimately he confides something of his life to his granddaughter, who is also unable to sleep, and by doing so perhaps starts coming to terms with the person he has become.

All of this is heavy stuff and yet, at the end, I was left with an "is that all there is?" feeling. I was hoping for a bit more substance to emerge from this thin novel. Still, I found it worth reading just for the enjoyment of Auster's prose: the writing is sharp and poignant. For that I can recommend it, but readers shouldn't expect the depth of Auster's best work.

RECOMMENDED