In one chaotic drunken spree the Man from Bodie destroys the nascent
town of Silver Sun, Dakota Territory, raping and rampaging his way through
the streets as cowardly townsmen look on helpless. The few survivors
pick up the pieces, change the town's name to Hard Times and slowly rebuild,
anxiously awaiting the evil man's inevitable return.
A funny thing happened as the Left attempted to undermine one of the
ur-myths of the American psyche; while trying to deconstruct the Western
and counter it with the anti-Western, they managed to create a body of
literature that was simply absorbed into the genre. Films like High
Noon, Butch
Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, The
Wild Bunch and the Spaghetti Westerns, novels like Lonesome
Dove and this one; all are essentially efforts to expose the ideology
of the Western as a lie by introducing brutality, whores, drunkenness,
cowardice, despair, genocide, etc. into the equation and each has simply
been swallowed and folded into the Western genre. Larry McMurtry
is the most amusing victim here. Lonesome Dove was published to much
fanfare about how it represented a new pinnacle in the anti-Western mode,
but it has instead been transformed into a mini-industry with sequels
and prequels,
mini
series and weekly series. McMurtry has become a prisoner of the
very legends he set out to destroy. Likewise, Cormac McCarthy was
thought of as an heir to Faulkner; his greatest novel was considered
to be Blood
Meridian, an ultraviolent Western, and noone read him. Then he
published the much more mainstream All
the Pretty Horses (see Review)
and suddenly he was a prize winning, best-selling author. There followed
two more installments in the Border
Trilogy and today he would be considered a Western author, not substantially
different than Zane Grey or Elmore Leonard, gone are his earlier Faulknerian
pretensions.
This phenomenon is easily explained and the reason for it says much
about the arrogance and willful blindness of these critics. The very
Westerns that they sought to demythologize were never as dewy eyed and
hagiographic as they assumed them to be. Take a look at three of
the great archetypes of the genre. The
Searchers (see Review) is basically
the story of how one man's hatred of Indians drives him over the edge.
To consider it to be an overly idealistic look at the West would be like
considering Moby
Dick and the portrayal of Ahab to be an overly idealistic look at whalers.
Similarly, Zane Grey's The
Riders of the Purple Sage (see Review)
depicts a West where good people stand little chance of surviving, to the
point where the story ends with our heroes sealing themselves off from
the rest of mankind in a hidden valley. This is hardly the stuff
of pastoral myth. Likewise, in Jack Schaeffer's great novel Shane
(see Review), the settlers are under
constant threat from the big ranchers and Shane, the archetypal gunslinger,
is basically welcome nowhere. In each of these stories, the West
is a horrible threatening place, filled with promise, but essentially hostile.
They present a much more complex and ambiguous view of the West than the
advocates of the anti-Western seem to comprehend.
Doctorow, of course, has built his career on trying to expose the dark
corners of the American soul: racism in Ragtime (see Review);
McCarthyism in The Book of Daniel; industrialism in The Waterworks;
and gangsterism in Billy Bathgate. The delightful irony is that
he has become a megabestselling author and Ragtime has even made it to
Broadway, hardly the reaction one would expect if his work was seriously
taken as an attack on the national ideology and mythos by the public.
Instead, he's become simply one more purveyor, albeit a talented one, of
historical fiction, his work informed more by nostalgia than by any revolutionary
commentary on the American past. Within that context, Welcome
to Hard Times is a perfectly acceptable first novel and a readable,
though not great, Western.
(Reviewed:26-Dec-99)
Grade: (C+)
Websites:
See also:
E.L. Doctorow (
3 books reviewed)
Westerns
E.L. Doctorow Links:
-ESSAY: W.G. Sebald: The modern novel's master strategist (E.L. Doctorow, March 23, 2003, LA Times)
Book-related and General Links:
-False
Documents: An E. L. Doctorow Page
-E.
L. Doctorow '48: Author and Professor (Bronx H.S. of Science)
-Mostly
Fiction: recommended books by E.L. Doctorow
-New
York State Writers Institute - E. L. Doctorow
-FEATURED
AUTHOR: E.L. Doctorow (NY Times Book Review)(reviews, etc.)
-INTERVIEW:
Doctorow, a Chronicler of the Past, Catches Up (NY Times)
-INTERVIEW:
The National Book Foundation presents a conversation with National
Book Award Winner E.L. Doctorow, author of World's Fair (Diane Osen,
National Book Foundation)
-PROFILE:
THE MYTH MAKER THE CREATIVE MIND: EL Doctorow (Bruce Weber, NY Times
Magazine)
-ESSAY
: In the Eighth Circle of Thieves (E.L. Doctorow, August 7/14, 2000,
The Nation)
-ESSAY:
THE PASSION OF OUR CALLING (E. L. Doctorow, NY Times Book Review)
-ESSAY:
WRITERS AND THE NOSTALGIC FALLACY (Marilynne Robinson, NY Times
Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of HARRIET BEECHER STOWE A Life. By Joan D. Hedrick (E. L. Doctorow,
NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of THE GARDEN OF EDEN By Ernest Hemingway (E. L. Doctorow, NY Times
Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING By Milan Kundera (E. L.
Doctorow, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of AN AMATEUR LABORER By Theodore Dreiser (E. L. Doctorow, NY
Times Book Review)
-ARTICLE:
E. L. Doctorow's New York; A Native of the Bronx Chronicles a Century of
the City
(BRUCE WEBER, NY Times)
-ARTICLE:
DOCTOROW REVISITS THE 'WORLD'S FAIR' OF HIS NOVEL (HERBERT MITGANG,
NY Times)
-ARTICLE:
Doctorow's People: Old Souls, New Bodies (HERBERT MITGANG, NY Times)
-ESSAY:
DOCTOROW: INVENTING MEMORY (SALLY LEVITT STEINBERG, NY Times
Book Review)
-Viet
Nam War: Doctorow, Heller and the Origins of U.S. Intervention (Daniel
Zins)
-ESSAY:
Tricksters in Doctorow and Kingston (Jonna Mackin)
-REVIEW:
Roger Sale: From Ragtime to Riches, NY Review of Books
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
-REVIEW:
Diane Johnson: Waiting for Righty, NY Review of Books
Loon Lake by E.L. Doctorow
-REVIEW:
of BILLY BATHGATE By E. L. Doctorow (Anne Tyler, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of Billy Bathgate (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, NY Times)
-REVIEW:
Garry Wills: Juggler's Code, NY Review of Books
Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow
-REVIEW:
of World's Fair (David Leavitt, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of World's Fair (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, NY Times)
-REVIEW:
Robert Towers: Three-Part Inventions, NY review of Books
World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow
Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Where She Was by Anderson Ferrell
-REVIEW:
of LIVES OF THE POETS Six Stories and a Novella. By E. L. Doctorow
(Benjamin DeMott, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of LIVES OF THE POETS Six Stories and a Novella. (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT,
NY Times)
-REVIEW:
Robert Towers: Light and Lively, NY Review of Books
Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino
Lives of the Poets: A Novella
and Six Stories by E.L. Doctorow
-REVIEW:
of THE WATERWORKS By E. L. Doctorow (Simon Schama, NY Times Book
Review)
-REVIEW:
of The Waterworks (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, NY Times)
-REVIEW:
Luc Sante: The Cabinet of Dr. Sartorius, NY Review of Books
The Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow
-REVIEW:
of Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution Selected Essays, 1977-1992
By E. L. Doctorow (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, NY Times)
-REVIEW:
CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD E.L. Doctorow's The Waterworks mixes a bizarre
horror story with the sights and sounds of 19th-century Manhattan (PAUL
GRAY, TIME)
-REVIEW
: of City of God by E. L. Doctrow (Walter Kirn, New York)
Comments:
Orrin welcomes reader comments on his reviews.
Add yours here.
Poor review. Shows little understanding of the depth or breadth of the genre it purports to deal with. One wonders whether the author has even read most of the books mentioned. Lets its politics determine its approach to art, failing to understand that for most of the authors mentioned the relationship is exactly the reverse.
- Tyler
- Feb-11-2006, 13:01
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