Review of GOD'S COUNTRY
Laughing your way into the Wild West' heart of darkness ...
It is rare that I read back-to-back books by the same novelist. This is a phenomenon of age. When I was in my twenties, in particular, I might read almost an entire oeuvre of a writer. Raymond Chandler, George Orwell, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Graham Greene are the ones that come most readily to mind. The closest I have come to replicating this youthful exuberance in the last twenty years was with a bevy of English writers ranging from Ian McEwan to Julian Barnes and Jane Gardham. I miss the feeling of diving into a writer’s work and suspect that what stops me is, as with so much of life now, a sense of time’s finiteness and wanting to keep up while I am interested enough to do so. Reading Everett’s stunning James provided me with a brief reprieve from this timidity.
God’s Country is written from the unapologetic racist point of view of an ignorant, amoral, and violent white male in the dangerous unsupervised West. It is another imaginative tour de force – a black writer sitting in the shoes of a protagonist who would prefer to shoot or, at least, whip every black (or Indian) he encounters and is put in a tenuous situation of near total reliance on a capable, free thinking, free black man. It is shot through with dark humor and trots along at a very quick pace. James is framed by Twain’s classic and, as such, delivers at levels this iconoclastic western does not even pretend to reach. Rather, it is a reminder that we still have a way to go to get to the real “wild” West despite by the turgid darkness of a “Deadwood” or “Unforgiven”. Pass on the movie on your next flight and read this.
God’s Country
Percival Everett
2003 232 pages (paperback
)