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  • Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry – Justified by Love

    Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry – Justified by Love

    Reflection by the Reviewer

    For most of my adult life, the stories and essays of Wendell Berry have been something close to a guiding light—not in an uncomplicated way, but in the way a good teacher unsettles you as much as he reassures you. Berry’s fiction has informed how I think about home, about whether and how to return to it, and even gave me the name for a daughter. I first read Jayber Crow around the year 2000, at an age when I understood the longing for an ancestral home. It struck me at a moment when I was considering whether it was possible to return to the old home place myself. That timing shapes how I read the book then, and it colors how I read it now. Whether it has a similar power for a reader without that particular urge is a fair question, and one I’ll come back to.

    The Basics about Jayber Crow

    The novel follows its namesake, the orphaned Jonah Crow, through an orphanage school, a stint at Bible college, and an unfocused period at university—none of which take, until he’s overtaken by the urge to return to a place he barely remembers. Flood and near-hypothermia deliver him, more by accident than design, to the newly abandoned barber shop in Port William, not far from where he lived as a boy with his parents and, later, his aunt.

    As the town’s new barber, he’s renamed Jayber—for reasons only a small, self-regarding town would arrive at—and becomes the quiet confidant of its stories, tragedies, and small triumphs. He meets Mattie Keith when she’s a schoolgirl and he’s barely older, and she becomes the one-sided, lifelong love of his life. The tales he retells—pride in work done right, connection across generations, the ordinary failure to live up to what we owe each other—are the raw material of what Berry calls the “membership” of Port William.

    The Membership of Port William

    What is a “membership”? Berry’s own description is the best one available: it’s a community “held together by frayed bonds of affection, mutual forgiveness, and a persistent will toward goodwill despite human failure.” It may be one of the more quietly radical ideas across his essays and novels—a concept that feels mostly lost, and that the book makes you want to see regained. But Berry is careful never to make it sound easy. It arrives, when it arrives at all, only through the kind of deliberate, unglamorous attention the quote above describes.

    The Protest of Unnatural Structure

    One of my favorite passages in the novel comes from Jayber, failed Bible-school student and reluctant philosopher, on faith and institution:

    “I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here.”

    Berry returns to this idea often in his essays: that people build their identity around organization and structure instead of around the people actually in front of them, and that much of what ails a community traces back to that misdirection. In Jayber Crow, the clearest case study is Troy Chatham—talented, popular, and determined to become a big man by adopting the agribusiness model rather than the land-stewardship his father-in-law, Athey Keith, had practiced his whole life. Athey works to give his family and hired hands just a little more than they need; Troy chases scale and margin, buys the machinery, takes the advice of the big names, and builds the structures he thinks will finally let him break through. He has no real concern for the people involved, and the book doesn’t let him off the hook for it.

    Comparisons in Modern Literature

    I consider Berry largely without close comparisons, but one beloved book comes to mind after some thought. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead in some ways mirrors the shape of this book in both story and emotion, even though the two authors rarely get shelved together. Both novels hand the whole story to an old man looking back—an Iowa preacher in Robinson’s case, a Kentucky barber turned lay theologian in Berry’s—and both use that retrospective voice masterfully to blur the line between memoir and sermon. Where they part ways is in scale and temperature. Pastor Ames’s Gilead is a town seen almost entirely through one household’s inheritance and one dying man’s reckoning with his own faith; Jayber’s Port William is wider and cooler-eyed, closer to a communal biography than a personal confession, more interested in what a whole membership owes each other than in what one man owes God. Put the two side by side and Berry’s book reads less like a novel about faith and more like a novel about the practice of belonging—which is, I think, exactly the distinction Jayber himself is drawing in the Protestant-road passage above.

    Ultimately, It’s About Love

    Jayber sees plainly the need for, and the cost of, love in holding a community together—the same love Athey Keith practices in his rejection of self-interest and his devotion to the land and the people on it. Jayber recognizes this early, and returns to it often, as here:

    “But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time… of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here… It is in the world, but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.”

    Jayber comes to understand that this love is unnatural—even necessary—for holding a community together. Life is his teacher, but he never takes the lesson for granted; he stays inside the mystery of it rather than resolving it:

    “For love is always more than a little strange here. It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it.”

    Closing Thoughts

    Jayber Crow is not a fast book, and it isn’t trying to be—its patience is the point. Where it’s most vulnerable is in that same patience: Berry trusts the accretion of small-town anecdote to carry the theology, and I could imagine that readers who want more forward motion in the back half may struggle with the waiting. But for anyone who has ever weighed staying against leaving, or wondered what’s actually owed to the people and the ground you came from, this is one of the clearest answers American fiction has given. It teaches us that the waiting is an important part of the process and it belongs on the same shelf as Gilead—and deserves to be read as closely.

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  • The Man Without a Conscience: Tom Horn in The Rim Country

    The Man Without a Conscience: Tom Horn in The Rim Country

    Readers who know their Old West history will recognize the name the moment he rides into the story. Tom Horn—real cavalry scout, Pinkerton man, and, eventually, the hired gun hanged in Wyoming in 1903 for the murder of a fourteen-year-old boy—makes an appearance in The Rim Country, and it’s worth separating what’s documented from what’s invented before saying how the novel puts him to use.

    What we actually know about Horn

    Tom Horn was a middle child: fifth of twelve, perhaps always looking to capture attention. It seems that much of his life involved his pursuing adrenaline-tingling opportunities and then eventually overstating them in his autobiography. He did not have nearly as large of a role in the pursuit of Geronimo as he claimed; probably he was just attached to the Army column that was eventually successful. He did not participate in the Battle of Cibecue Creek as he alleged. This has been debunked by historians. Overstatement of his skills got him hired by Pinkerton, where he arrested a few outlaws—right before he was arrested himself for robbing a New Mexico casino.

    The historical Horn was definitely in Arizona Territory—the setting of “The Rim Country”—in the early-to-mid 1880s, working as an army scout and interpreter. He had a hand in the campaigns against Geronimo and was present for the surrender in 1886. By the 1890s he’d remade himself as a “stock detective” for Wyoming’s big cattle interests, a euphemism that meant intimidating and, when the money called for it, killing suspected rustlers. His participation in he Pleasant Valley War, which ran roughly 1887–1892 in the Tonto Basin, is lightly documented and partially legendary: he was in the vicinity and his resume shows a blank for those years, he was known to be connected with Ed Tewksbury, there is evidence he was deputized by various lawmen in the area, and he was the right kind of man. There are reasons to believe the stories of his involvement, but remember that The Rim Country is extrapolating, not reporting.

    What the novel does with that gap

    That’s the honest frame for how Horn functions in the book: he’s a plausible, legendary ghost slotted into a real conflict, hired—in this telling—by multiple different parties who need a man with no conscience and a fastidious dedication to his employers’ requirements. In the book, he doesn’t take a side in the Graham–Tewksbury feud itself. He’s there to survey the terrain, read the cattlemen, and price out how much violence it will take to move accomplish powerful people’s goals.

    The more interesting choice is formal rather than factual. Nora Callahan, the novel’s central sensitive, can read intention and conscience in the people around her—except in Horn. He registers to her gift as an absence, not a color on the spectrum of good and bad men. That blankness becomes the novel’s way of characterizing him without narrating a backstory: rather than explaining what made Horn what he was, the book lets a reader feel the specific chill of a man who has simply removed himself from the moral register altogether, and lets that stand as its own kind of history—the kind that doesn’t survive in an archive but was very likely true of somebody in that valley in those years, whether or not it was true of Horn precisely.

    It’s a case for how historical fiction can be honest about its own liberties: naming a real man with a legend of involvement, borrowing his known reputation, and then openly building fiction into the years the record doesn’t cover.

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  • Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens – Bane of Northern Arizona Outlaws

    Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens – Bane of Northern Arizona Outlaws

    One of the most interesting lawmen featured in “The Rim Country” series is Commodore Perry Owens. Named by his mother after the famous Naval hero Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry and born in Tennessee, Owens grew up farming and ranching.

    The Call of the West

    Perry was called west at age 13, when he ran away from his family and developed his legendary accuracy with a hip-fired rifle as a Buffalo hunter for the railroad. This experience found him positions on ranches as a cowboy in both Oklahoma and New Mexico and led some folks to initially underestimate him for his young age—something they quickly learned had been a huge mistake.

    He worked for a while for James Houck (see my article on Houck here) in Navajo Springs and was highly-tested, becoming involved in repelling a number of raids on the Trading Post. This reputation led to his being nominated to run for sheriff of Apache County, AZ, where wild young cowboys—many associated with the Aztec Land and Cattle Company—had taken over the important town of Holbrook. He was elected in late 1886, ostensibly to clean up the county and was almost immediately handed a number of really challenging bench warrants to serve: including one for Andy Cooper, leader of the Blevins gang who he had a huge role in kick-starting the deadly Pleasant Valley range war.

    The Holbrook Ninety Second Shootout

    On September of 1887, Sheriff Owens rode to Holbrook with a warrant for Cooper — possibly spurred by rumors that Cooper had bragged about a couple of murders down in Pleasant Valley. The Blevins family had rented a house in town for their wives and children, and twelve people were inside that day, including Andy, his brother John, his teenage brother Sam, and gang member Mose Roberts.

    According to Earle Forrest’s Arizona’s Dark and Bloody Ground — drawn from primary sources and witnesses who only later were willing to talk — Owens walked up to the door cradling his Winchester. Cooper crept up behind the door to surprise him while John Blevins tried the same from another room. Owens called for Cooper to come out; it’s not clear who fired first, but Cooper went down first. John Blevins fired and missed; Cooper’s Winchester finished him. Mose Roberts jumped through a door with a six-shooter and was also dispatched. Finally, teenaged Sam Blevins grabbed his brother’s gun to avenge him, and was shot dead too. In ninety seconds, three men were dead and John Blevins was wounded.

    An inquest followed. The Blevins women testified otherwise, but the jury knew Cooper always went armed around Holbrook, and Owens was cleared. Holbrook — “the town too tough for churches” — eventually got law and order, and churches too.

    Owens’ Unique Style

    Owens wore his red hair long under a flat-brimmed hat and dressed like a cowboy, unlike most sheriffs of his day. He carried his pistol with the grip reversed for a cross-draw — not the “optimal” rig by contemporary standards, which led outlaws to underestimate him too.

    Owens in The Rim Country

    In The Rim Country, Owens appears in Book Two – The War (1887). I try to treat him as history shows him: honest and precise — he even accounted for postage stamps in his office budget. He meets my main character, Nora, in Holbrook, and is very charming, as he was known to be with the ladies. His connection with James Houck is there too, and it’s uncertain whether he’s fully aware of what Houck is doing wearing a Deputy Sheriff badge down in the valley.

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  • Billy Mulvenon – Ambitious Sheriff from the Capital of Arizona Territory

    Billy Mulvenon – Ambitious Sheriff from the Capital of Arizona Territory

    If you’ve been following this blog’s excursions into the Pleasant Valley War, you’ve met the Grahams and the Tewksburys, the sheepmen and the cattlemen, the Mogollon Rim looming over all of it. This time the subject is the law itself—or what passed for it in 1880s Arizona Territory—in the person of Sheriff Billy Mulvenon.

    Mulvenon arrived in Arizona Territory in 1876 and took his first job as a stable keeper for a local mine. That not being fully satisfactory, he became a Deputy Sheriff for Yavapai County, home to the territorial capital, Prescott. After four years as deputy, he was elected sheriff in 1885.

    A Bad Year to Take Office

    As historians of the territory would tell you, 1885 was a poor year to become sheriff of a county that notionally had oversight of the powder keg in the Tonto Basin known as Pleasant Valley. For the next two years the feud between the Grahams and the Tewksburys smoldered without drawing Mulvenon in directly—Payson, where he kept an office, was close enough to the valley to hear the trouble but far enough to stay out of it. That changed early in 1887, when Jim Tewksbury shot two men from the rival faction in a killing that couldn’t quite be called self-defense. Mulvenon enlisted a posse from Payson to invade the valley and arrest the Tewksburys. The clan ran and hid, the search turned up nothing, and Mulvenon retreated to the relative comfort of Payson and Prescott, his first expedition a complete failure.

    Mulvenon’s Second Invasion

    Eventually the noise from the valley reached too many newspapers in the territory for the governor to ignore. After John Tewksbury and a ranch hand were murdered by the Graham faction—likely at the hands of the notorious gunfighter Andy Cooper—the governor ordered the sheriff to act. In writing.

    Mulvenon went first to Payson, where his deputy, was in residence, and the two of them raised a second posse, this one including men sympathetic to the Tewksburys. Among them was probably James Houck, a sheepherder who knew the valley from his time as a deputy sheriff in Apache County to the northeast, and who was himself suspected of favoring the Tewksbury side—the cattlemen who, for their own complicated reasons, had opened Pleasant Valley to sheep. The record on exactly who rode with Mulvenon and why is thin and self-serving in places; contemporaries had every reason to shade their own involvement after the fact.

    Acting on advice that turned out to be bad, Mulvenon staked out the most central spot in the valley—the Perkins dry goods store, where both sides of the feud did their shopping. His first customers were from the Graham faction: John Graham, the family’s elder statesman, and Charles Blevins, Andy Cooper’s younger brother (Cooper operated under a false surname for reasons that needed no explanation). Mulvenon went on to round up every combatant he could find. Most of the Grahams escaped and couldn’t be tracked; the Tewksburys, wiser, negotiated a favorable surrender. Mulvenon rode home believing himself a hero—until reports surfaced that he’d fired first on unarmed men, and he found himself facing trial for murder.

    He was acquitted. The frontier press had already cast him as the hero of the hour, and Prescott, as it turned out, preferred a heroic sheriff to a valley full of feuding families—regardless of what the evidence actually showed.

    Mulvenon outlasted the controversy. He went on to serve in the Arizona Legislature and founded the Arizona Brewing Company, operating it out of a building in Prescott still known today as the Mulvenon Building—a legacy that outstripped, in the end, anything he accomplished in Pleasant Valley.

    Mulvenon’s Representation in “The Rim Country”

    Mulvenon is present in Book Two of The Rim Country much as the record suggests he was: a man riding at the head of a posse he doesn’t fully control, chasing a resolution that keeps slipping past him until the second invasion finally forces one. I’ve leaned heavily on Earle Forrest’s Arizona’s Dark and Bloody Ground, which remains the best-reasoned reconstruction of the surviving primary sources. Almost every account written before Forrest’s was compromised by participants protecting their own reputations or covering their embarrassment, and the contemporary newspaper reports are, in places, almost comically—and demonstrably—wrong. Reconstructing Mulvenon meant reading through that fog rather than trusting any single source at face value.

    On the page, he comes off as a lesser figure than Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens of Apache County, and I think that’s the honest read of the history, not just a novelist’s preference. Owens had the clean, decisive triumphs—taking down the Blevins gang single-handedly in St. Johns, later doing the same to Ike Clanton. Mulvenon’s expeditions had real institutional force behind them and plenty of newspaper coverage, but every one of them carried some unresolved stain, whether it was a failed first raid or a body count he had to answer for in court. That contrast—the sheriff who gets the clean legend versus the sheriff who gets the complicated one—is part of what makes Pleasant Valley worth telling as fiction rather than just recounting as fact.

    If you want to see how that plays out on the page, Book One of The Rim Country is available for sale at https://todnewman.com/shop/the-rim-country, with Book Two—The War (1887)—following as I finish it.

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  • Indie Book Review: J.R. Larriba’s “Itsy Bitsy Spider: Evolution

    Indie Book Review: J.R. Larriba’s “Itsy Bitsy Spider: Evolution

    Occasionally I pick up books by indie writers who are getting solid reviews. I find this helps me stay a bit more tuned to the era I actually live in, but I also like supporting people with my reviews who have a vision, the compulsion to write the story of what they can see, and the discipline to jump through all the many challenges thrown up for writers who want to self-publish or publish through an indie press. This book is an excellent example of this kind of ambitious, vision-driven work.

    Synopsis

    Itsy Bitsy Spyder: Evolution opens as a fog-choked Marin County procedural—a burned-out detective, a string of impossible murders, a witness who is deaf and blind and somehow the only one who saw anything true—before it sheds its genre skin entirely and reveals a cosmology of buried gods, inherited guilt, and a war being fought in the space between what people believe is real and what horrors actually moved through their house last night. As it turns out, Larriba isn’t interested in a clean mystery; he’s interested in what happens when grief discovers its monster wearing a face that is shockingly familiar. Readers who want their horror operatic, myth-soaked, and ambivalent about protecting the expected procedural scaffolding will find a book built for them.

    Technical Assessment

    The plot’s ambition is real: fusing a Bay Area crime lab story with Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican myth, and folding a 1100 AD timeline into a 2025 one via a shared cursed artifact, is an infrequently-seen combination, and the two threads do converge with believability rather than gesture.

    Thematically the book is strongest where it’s most specific—Sofia’s arc, in which a supernaturally restored sense of sight becomes something to mourn rather than celebrate, is the novel’s best idea and reveals some true character interiority. I found it compelling. Other character work is uneven: Krill’s grief is carried by consistent, recurring imagery (the coin, the sycamores, the cat) rather than stated clearly and dropped, which creates a gravity that is heavily leaned on. Ortega and Dex are comparatively thin, useful mostly for exposition and banter, though Dex’s parallel-hell backstory surprises the character himself and retroactively earns him more sympathy than the middle chapters suggest he deserves. Pacing sags in the middle third, where set-piece horror sequences (the owl nest, the deer-pit ambush) accumulate faster than the plot advances, and the late-book pivot—turning two characters, previously sympathetic, into instruments of the antagonist—will read as either a bold genre swing or a bait-and-switch depending on how closely a reader was tracking the foreshadowing: it doesn’t come across as cheating, but it isn’t gentle either.

    Comparisons

    Larriba’s work is hard to describe—his prose consists of stacked fragments and em-dash driven accumulations of short bursts of information. Sometimes it flows brilliantly. The novel also explores how actions from the distant past directly influence the present-day “crime noir” story that the novel presents itself as initially. Reconsidering how Larriba pulls this off is a worthwhile and enjoyable activity.

    Perhaps surprisingly, the reading eventually brought to mind one of my favorite works of Faulkner—Absalom, Absalom!—and surfaced some solid comparisons and contrasts.

    Absalom, Absalom! is at its fundamental core all about buried ancestral influence—Sutpen’s sin that was planted generations back that reaches forward in time and destroys everyone downstream, even those with no knowledge of their poisonous inheritance. Larriba is structurally taking this approach too: Sofia’s line, Krill’s family, Dex, and indeed the whole valley are caught up in something planted long before any of them existed—so long, in fact, that it extends in part back to the Sumerian empire and the Tower of Babel. The horror that Larriba unveils is not really the murders—they’re shocking at first, but are quickly exceeded by the knowledge that the present is not free from the evil of the past. Both Faulkner and Larriba make good use of their unique landscapes as a holder of that buried history: the darkness of the rotting Sutpen’s Hundred homestead and the fog-choked valley are working this narrative relentlessly. This is the Gothic ideal coming out in both writers—making the place complicit in the darkness.

    Larriba’s prose density accomplishes something different than Faulkner, however. Faulkner’s goal in Absalom is to use a rambling maximalist syntax to make the past sins unknowable and the varied recountings of them unreliable—yet progressively revealing what can actually be known. Larriba uses a similar style in dense description, instead, to make the present known but unbearable. Two very different distinctions. Both writers are swimming in the Gothic tradition of ancestral curse and haunted terrain, but Faulkner wrote an epistemological novel that appeared Gothic while Larriba’s is a sensory-horror novel borrowing Gothic’s primary premise—the sins of the fathers.

    Conclusion

    I spent some time and energy with this novel trying to categorize it into a box I that I could articulate. First it was crime noir, then mass murderer, then conspiracy, then human-augmentation. All of these themes are present and the reader is led carefully by the hand to the categorization attempt—but eventually I stopped trying to find the book’s niche and settled on what I wrote above—sensory horror with strong Gothic flair.

    There are places where the prose takes on too heavy a shade of purple and disrupts flow. And often there are unusual words that get over-leveraged (“glyph” and “rune”, among others). But it always seemed that at the point I noticed the breaking of flow, if I pushed through it for a few more sentences it could be regained. Just the same as with Faulkner.

    Did Larriba write a novel worthy of his Gothic predecessors? I think they would have recognized him as a neighbor working in the same beloved fields. Does it have the greatness of Faulkner’s best works? No, not yet, but perhaps someday.

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  • James D. Houck – Mail Carrier, Prospector, Trader, Lawman, Sheepherder, Arizona state legislator.

    James D. Houck – Mail Carrier, Prospector, Trader, Lawman, Sheepherder, Arizona state legislator.

    James Houck is another in a breed who drifted west in the late 1800’s to Arizona Territory—a man who was a walking contradiction. He fought in the Civil War with a Wisconsin regiment and prospected in Wyoming and Colorado before settling in Arizona at the age of 23.

    The Early Life – Ambitious and Optimistic

    At twenty-three, Houck settled in Arizona Territory relying on his Civil War experience and some failed prospecting ventures. Like my main character, Nora, from my current The Rim Country series, he came west with all his belongings packed on a mule or burro. Both of them came west with little margin searching for a new life. Nora sought a business that would be important to her community; Houck seems to have sought quick wealth.

    Early on, he got a contract with the Army to carry mail between Fort Whipple and Fort Wingate—dangerous work due to the dry, waterless terrain and the ever-present risk of attacks by the natives. He held this contract three years, then used what he’d learned of the country and its people to establish a trading post on the Puerco River, betting correctly that the railroad would come through and make his fortune. It is likely that his Navajo neighbors taught him the sheep business here.

    The bet paid off. When the railroad arrived, Houck had already built water tanks for the steam engines to be topped off—his trading post became a scheduled stop. A settlement grew up around it taking his name: “Houck’s Tank”.

    From there Houck again moved on, up into the higher country around Springerville and Heber, where he established a ranch and raised both cattle and sheep and was elected to represent Apache County as a state legislator. It was an uncomfortable position to hold two ways at once—a sheepman caught between the wealthy Flagstaff sheep interests, the Aztec Land and Cattle Company’s holdings around Holbrook, and the growing cattle business taking shape in Pleasant Valley below the Rim, all of it held in an uneasy truce that kept sheep from crossing into cattle country at the boundary of the Rim itself.

    Deputy Sheriff Houck Complicates the Pleasant Valley war

    In his early forties, Houck was recruited or volunteered to serve under the well-known lawman Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens of Apache County. It’s unclear why he chose this thankless job, but in time he was embedded down in Pleasant Valley advertising that he was officially sent to help curtail the range war between the cattlemen and the sheepmen. Since he was a sheepman himself, there was much suspicion that he was aligned on one side of the battle. The record shows that he was involved in extrajudicial killings of multiple men solely connected to the cattle ranching side of the war—and that most likely he lied repeatedly to cover it up. There’s no evidence that he ever had warrants for these men. The record indicates he was operating more as a mercenary but with a badge.

    In 1900, thirteen years after the Pleasant Valley war, Houck bought Cave Creek station, north of Phoenix, and developed it as a shearing camp for sheepmen. His general store was built of rock, solid and a local reference point. He filled his time by jumping back into enforcing the law in Maricopa County and getting some mail routes. Eventually Cave Creek—and the Houck Ranch—became sought after by tuberculars looking for better weather.

    Houck saw a downturn in his fortune as a drought and persistent overgrazing brought Cave Creek down to a trickle and many of the folks moved away. Houck got divorced, remarried, and eventually closed his store. The King of Cave Creek was broken and took a fatal dose of strychnine at age 75.

    Houck in “The Rim Country” Book Two

    In the second book of the Rim Country series, Houck makes an appearance. Consistent with the best analysis (Arizona’s Dark and Bloody Ground, by Earle R. Forrest) that sifted through the oft-contradictory primary sources, Houck was aligned with the Tewksbury family and may have used his badge in the valley without the knowledge of Sheriff Owens in St. Johns. This is how I write him. He made claims to have warrants that history is fairly clear that he didn’t have—Owens had a hard time getting warrants even for the Blevins boys himself. Doubtful the judge ever gave him a warrant for the Grahams.

    I show Houck going through the valley looking for information—something it seems likely he would have done for a while. When William Graham—John’s little brother—is murdered, I write the story of Houck taking credit for it, knowing that the lawless conditions in the valley plus his official position will protect him. I also speculate in the book, due to some reports that William Graham indicated he was shot by a Tewksbury, that Houck was covering for one of his Tewksbury friends—possibly Ed. We’ll never know for sure, but what we do know is that Houck’s time in Pleasant Valley created undue chaos. I attempt to show this confusion through the eyes of multiple characters.

    How was the valley confused? Houck was hunting Grahams at the same time a different county sheriff was attempting to serve warrants to the Tewksbury men for the murder of Hamp Blevins. There was also known to be a marauding band of Chiricahua Apache in the valley pillaging ranches while resisting being sent west to Florida by the U.S. Army.

    It seems clear that Houck was involved in five or six murders, including a lynching in the valley. The lynching, especially, seemed very useful to Houck’s career ambitions. Houck was found grazing sheep on the ranch of one of the victims afterwards and indicated to the victim’s mother that nothing would ever be done about the lynching. This is what the best analysis of the historical record indicates; in my novel I fill in the gaps to try to explain Houck’s motivations.

    Conclusion – How I Treat Houck in The RIm Country

    In The Rim Country: The War (1887), I work to capture all of this ambiguity about Houck. Someone who fought in the war, served the government, traded with the Navajo, and desired to be a deputy sheriff must have some redeeming qualities. But a deeper look into his life reveals a man who was inconsistent and was always looking for greener grass on the other side of the range.

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  • I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger: Hope Despite Inhumanity

    I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger: Hope Despite Inhumanity

    Recently I shared with someone that it was my solid opinion that Leif Enger, Marilynne Robinson, and Wendell Berry were among the greatest living American writers.

    That was said while I was in the middle of reading Enger’s mesmerizing I Cheerfully Refuse, his most recently published book. I have been so pleased with his previous books, that I felt overjoyed with the chance to read another. To me that’s the mark of a great writer—I look forward to reading and even re-reading their books.

    I Cheerfully Refuse has some of the same characteristics that Enger uses to drive the plot of his other novels. Engaging characters, an important journey to regain something lost, moments of despair when the character’s situation seems impossible to overcome, and joy in the resolution. Enger doesn’t wallow in the despair but eventually points to a slightly reimagined joy. This is not shallow or condescending—Enger has just set his eyes higher upon things he believes to be true. He is not post-modern and certainly is the opposite of nihilist.

    Revising The Road by McCarthy

    Throughout this book, my mind returned to the dystopian future of post-destruction spelled out in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (find my review HERE). Though many reviewers have clearly gotten trapped in the futility and despair that McCarthy paints, he is careful to outline small but detectable glimmers of hope. In I Cheerfully Refuse, Enger presents the same sorts of dysfunction that McCarthy portrays so ruthlessly, but has a much stronger intention to portray the hope that lies behind.

    The Errant Knight and Protector

    A frequent reference is Don Quixote, the hopeful errant knight who is called to courage and loyalty and the slaying of dragons. The main character, Rainy, who often presents as a type of Quixote in this book is nevertheless, well aware of the unromantic end of Quixote after his defeat by the Knight of the White Moon:

    A romantic fears romance is not enough. It wasn’t enough for Quixote—did you know that? I wish I’d never finished that book. Romance was a trapdoor for him and finally gave way, for the old knight lost his bold lunacy and belief in giants—without which who would’ve read his thousand pages?—and used his last moments to denounce all tales and frivolity, and died like any fretful pensioner, his concluding mission in this world ensuring his stupid will got notarized. In the end it was all churchmen and attorneys, even for Quixote. That’s what made my mouth go dry. That’s what kept me up till dawn, and I’m sorry to lay it off on you, if you didn’t know, or had managed to forget.

    – Enger, Leif. I Cheerfully Refuse

    At the point that Rainy makes this statement, he has yet to realize that he IS the romantic Don Quixote, because life will deal him many blows that he will adapt to and overcome. He will seek to protect above all, and sometimes fail and other times succeed. He notes early on in the book with reference to a bullied music student:

    It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.

    – Enger, Leif. I Cheerfully Refuse

    Throughout, though he is often tempted by the world which has fallen around him into chaos and horror, his true self sneaks through and reminds him of who he is. I sum this up with his thought that refocuses himself out of deep grief onto his mission: “Maybe now and then the windmill IS a giant.” Maybe it is, and probably we all need to remember this as well.

    Surrounded by Inhumanity

    The world Rainy is navigating is truly fallen and unfair. There has been a devastating event, that seems to have been associated with a comet. Many towns have lost their organizational structures altogether. Rainy becomes the guardian of one of the best characters in any book I’ve read recently, Sol, a nine year old whirlwind girl, but the place he finds her matches in its hopelessness anything that McCarthy presented in the worst places of The Road. She is orphaned and has somehow been passed around—most likely sold—and is now the ward of an illiterate version of the modern Skinhead. Wrapped up in far-right ideology, carrying the image of the Bible and the cross without any knowledge or interest in what they may really symbolize. Obsessed with power, self-preservation, and wealth. Rainy trades his beloved Fender bass guitar to take away Sol to a better place and the “guardian” agrees quickly. Sol becomes the daughter he was never able to have and the light of his life.

    But the theme of abject inhumanity rears up frequently in their journey to go to some far off island chain in Lake Superior on Rainy’s sailboat. It is there that a mystical experience might happen. Or it might not, but Rainy has hope. Plenty of others exist to steal that hope: a heartless drawbridge operator who charges such a high toll to cross under or over the bridge that it devastates a whole island, a sleepless pursuer who seeks to draw Rainy into his medical experimentation community anchored in a remote location on the lake, “astronauts”—the uber-rich who live in ways and places that seem like outer space to most normal people and who treat humanity as their own possession.

    Despite the theme of inhumanity to humans, there are bright points, such as when Sol reveals to Rainy that she stole the money of her abusive “guardian” before he traded her for the guitar. Rainy’s response is legendary:

    I fell silent then, and Sol sulked and wouldn’t look at me, because at the age of nine, with years of abuse already behind her, she had the flair and velocity to steal more of Richard’s money than Richard could apparently count, and I didn’t treat her like a hero for it, though she obviously was.

    – Enger, Leif. I Cheerfully Refuse

    Closing

    One theme that persists, though, is the notion of leaving something that remains. Much of this is tied up in books and bookstores and the author Molly Thorn, the title of whose rare, beloved book becomes this title of this novel. Molly Thorn has left many important things behind her and these have encouraged Rainy, his wife Lark, Sol, and even the villain in the book. Her words do not pick and choose who they will encourage. But Rainy learns that words are important. Rainy teaches Sol to write and instructs her on the importance of words:

    “Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I’ve been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.” Sol’s face remained far away. Her cheeks were white and hollow, but her eyes shone a bit, I was fairly sure.

    Enger, Leif. I Cheerfully Refuse

    And so we see the humanity and its effort to overcome the unfairness the only way possible. By giving back and encouraging and providing hope—even in a place where hope is scorned and rarely visible. But it’s there, and words can bring it back.

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  • Video Update on Pleasant Valley War Novel Series

    See what you think. I’m trying different ways to get the word out on how Book Two of “The Rim Country” series is coming.

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  • “A Canticle for Leibowitz” — A study of the Cycles of History and Myth

    “A Canticle for Leibowitz” — A study of the Cycles of History and Myth

    A Canticle for Leibowitz is a fascinating compilation of three linked short stories, tied together by the fictional Saint Leibowitz, an engineer who survived the nuclear war that laid waste to much of the world. Leibowitz spends his post-war life preserving books and knowledge in the face of a Luddite-like “Simplifier” mob bent on extracting revenge against the world’s intelligentsia for allowing the devastation in the first place. Ultimately, the combined three stories that make up this novel present a compelling study of the cycles of history and myth.

    Walter M. Miller Jr. wrote the novel in the 1950s, and it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel from the World Science Fiction Convention in 1961. Miller is someone I can understand: an engineer by training, an author by years of practice, and a man preoccupied with technology’s impact on society. He served in the military and, like many veterans, carried things from that service that haunted him. He was also drawn to themes I find myself circling back to again and again—religion, church versus state, historical symmetry, societal decay, truth, courage and sacrifice.

    So I came to this novel with real excitement. I knew how it had influenced many of today’s familiar novels and video games, and I knew the regard it’s held in among science-fiction-loving friends of mine. I’ve read that it’s the one literary masterpiece to emerge from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—reason enough, on its own, to give it my time.

    The Three Stories

    I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll tread carefully. The first of the three stories opens generations after Saint Leibowitz—not yet officially a saint in the story’s own timeframe—lived and ministered. It follows Francis, a poor, long-suffering acolyte who spends long vigils in the desert, largely as a consequence of his gift for annoying the Abbot of the monastery where the Beatus Leibowitz is venerated, and where books and scraps of “ancient” technological memorabilia are protected. A wanderer leads Francis to discover a buried nuclear shelter containing an original blueprint drawn by Leibowitz himself, back when he was still an engineer. The discovery sets off a chain of events that eventually brings Francis to the priesthood.

    What’s interesting about the second and third stories is that they echo the pattern of the first without ever feeling formulaic. The Wanderer—apparently very long-lived—reappears in each. Someone within the Abbey, generations later, remains underappreciated yet still willing to take a risk. And slowly, technology begins its return to the world, still shepherded by the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz. This is the pattern of cycles Miller’s writing keeps circling back to. Some reviewers call it recurrence; I read it more as what the social sciences term social cycle theory—a framework standing in direct opposition to social evolutionism.

    Cycles, Not Progress

    What’s the difference? Social evolutionism assumes progress projects forward indefinitely, as far as the historical eye can see. It’s a relatively recent idea, and honestly, not one history bears out very well. Social cycle theory, by contrast, is evidenced by the myths and stories found across nearly every human society. Like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, I’m convinced these myths recur because they are imperfect reflections of an objective truth. Miller sees the same pattern at work in this novel—the conflicts between the Abbey and the “secular” world echo those experienced by the early church fathers, then later the Holy Roman Empire, and, broadly, the tension still playing out today between secular science and the church.

    Passages Worth Sitting With

    Several passages are both thoughtful and quietly devastating. In the second story, the scientist Thon Taddeo watches a peasant pass before him and Father Apollo of the Abbey, and scoffs:

    “Look at him, and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization? What do you see?”

    “The image of Christ,” grated the monsignor, surprised at his own sudden anger. “What did you expect me to see?”

    The scholar huffed impatiently. “The incongruity. Men as you can observe them through any window, and men as historians would have us believe men once were. I can’t accept it. How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?”

    “Perhaps,” said Apollo, “by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.”

    — Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (p. 165)

    A society materially great and wise, but great and wise in no other way—worth pondering for a while. Later, Thon Taddeo addresses the assembled monks at dinner about the learning he’s uncovered in their hidden archives. He speaks of a coming “new prince”—Truth—who will rule the future, and of technology’s return, the world remade in the image of the one it lost. But first, he warns:

    “And how will this come to pass?” He paused and lowered his voice. “In the same way all change comes to pass, I fear. And I am sorry it is so. It will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and by fury, for no change comes calmly over the world.”

    — Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (p. 274)

    The monks listening demur, and when the scholar presses them on why, one answers:

    “Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power.”

    — Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (p. 274)

    Much of what the monks tell the scholar proves an accurate prediction of what continues to unfold in the novel. Eventually the story arrives at a resolution to the pain that keeps resurfacing under the kingdom of ignorance. In the third story, Abbot Zerchi imagines a conversation with Dr. Cors, a man he had clashed with over Cors’ recommendation of euthanasia for nuclear-strike victims:

    “Listen, my dear Cors, why don’t you forgive God for allowing pain? If He didn’t allow it, human courage, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice would all be meaningless things. Besides, you’d be out of a job, Cors.”

    — Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (p. 425)

    Verdict

    We arrive, in the end, at what seems to be the author’s reason for capturing this cyclical pain and suffering: without it, there is no way to speak honestly of the courage and self-sacrifice that rises to meet it.

    And that is an awfully good reason to write stories.

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  • Thoughts on the Old West: Violent, Racist, Misogynistic?

    Thoughts on the Old West: Violent, Racist, Misogynistic?

    I recently completed my first novel in the Western genre.

    I have read this novel at least ten times by now, and just finished reading the author’s proof that I received in the mail. I feel somewhat guilty about really enjoying this book—surely I’m biased and am missing something.

    One thing I consciously chose to avoid in this novel—the first in a series of three that is going to explore the terrible things that happened in the Pleasant Valley range war of 1880’s Arizona Territory—is graphic violence of the sort that our culture enjoys in the abstract sense provided by books and movies. Perhaps this is because modern America is unfamiliar with real violence. In my novel, when the first few murders of the range war occur, they happen off stage—still incredibly impactful to the community, but not graphically represented for the reader. I’m doing this on purpose, but I will need to adjust this stylistically as the range war erupts and chaos starts to take over. I’m pondering how to do this in a consistent way.

    My main character is a pretty unusual one. She becomes our guide to the humanity and the inhumanity behind the cause of this range war. She is a widow who had plans to go to Arizona before her husband passed away suddenly. Very unusual case. I have considered if she’s too unusual, but then I remember my grandma and my great-grandma and their hard, adventurous people, and I think maybe she’s not completely unreal.

    One thing in the first book I intentionally showed was how the ranch community welcomed her and admired what she brought to the community. She’s tough and unbending—even while silently grieving a recently dead husband. She has great powers of observation. She counts things and remembers them. She works on the small plot that she bought with the first proceeds from her freighting business—driving small numbers of cattle and hauling goods between the isolated valley and the two closest towns—each of which is over eighty miles away.

    I made a point to reflect a culture we no longer remember where men showed respect to women, particularly women they admired. I also am trying to show a historically representative ranching culture where Anglos expanding to the west interact with families who had moved north from Mexico generations earlier. In my book, just like in the world of my grandparents, these two different cultures have the general tendency to appreciate each other and each other’s traditions.

    I read an interview with Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”) recently where he felt over-focused on the “badness” of the American West. He stated his goal was to “demythologize” the West, mostly because he believed that “The history of our country is a violent history, a racist history, and a misogynistic history. It wouldn’t be correct, politically or otherwise, to paint it as civilized.”

    Though I love his characters and books while disagreeing with the decisions he made in them, I wonder if it’s the place of any author to “demythologize” history. Especially if we are doing this from within the comfortable boundaries of our own mythologies. My objective is to present the history accurately and with as little of my twenty-first century bias as I can manage.

    I think about the mythology of the 1880’s in the West. The mythology of my Great Great Grandfather, who sold a horse to Jesse James after fighting in a Civil War on the opposite side of Jesse. Who built a small farm despite pressure from outlaws, dangerous wildlife, and disease and loss. I suspect we have exaggerated the more brutal aspects of his mythology for our own entertainment, but they were certainly a part of it.

    In interviews, McMurtry admitted that though he had intended “Lonesome Dove” to “demythologize” the West, he quickly recognized that he had only accomplished the opposite. “Lonesome Dove,” which had been intended to be a long critique of western mythology, had become the chief source of western mythology. So when I write this book about the Old West, I try to do something different: navigate the place between the wilder parts of their era without forgetting the basic humanity they held, which in many ways was stronger than our own.

    This “navigation” will be a good challenge as I move into the rest of the story, though. Stay tuned for Book Two in “The Rim Country,” where things begin to drift out of control and new players emerge with their own objectives and goals.

    Find Book One of “The Rim Country” at the links below:

    The Rim Country: Book One, ‘The Invitation’ (paperbook)

    The Rim Country: Book One, ‘The Invitation’ (ebook)