The Cowboy Dog, by Nigel Cox.

This is the second Nigel Cox book I've read, after Tarzan Presley, and it's also about taking American myths and putting them in the middle of New Zealand. The boy Chester, soon to be known as Dog, flees his home in the cattle-ranching lands after his father is shot, and makes his way by rail to the city, Auckland, which doesn't work like places he's used to. There, he's taken in by the owner of a burger joint, who treats him a little bit well and a little bit terribly, a bit like a boy and a bit like a dog. One day he'll go back to the lands and avenge his father. (But New Zealand doesn't really have the kind of cattle-ranching lands he remembers. Are his memories of them real?)

This is an odd book. Partway through I was absolutely convinced that Chester had overwritten most of his childhood memories with cowboy-related radio shows and stories and dreams, and we were going to learn that the place he came from had never existed. This tension keeps being played with through the book, but not in the way I'd have guessed. The style is spare and beautiful and has that feeling of having literary fiction antecedents I haven't read.

If I was summing up the book in a sentence, I'd say it's about the violence of men in Westerns. There's a lot here about Chester's ability to see and diffuse it in the faces and postures of men. It's a very inside-the-male-gaze book, there are two female characters and they are both defined largely by their appearances and by the violence men do them.

One thing about this book is that it was written in very little time, as Nigel was dying. I am impressed by it, knowing that. He was a friend of my dad's, and I met him, though I don't have many memories of him.




The Known World, by Edward P. Jones.

Courtesy of ambyr and coffeeandink. This is a book set at the very end of slavery, before abolition, centered on the plantation of Henry, a Black man born in slavery who is freed and goes on to own slaves himself. I liked it so much that I nearly started it again from the beginning once I'd finished it. I didn't find it hard to read, but various plot-threads did end bleakly enough to dissuade me from this idea. I definitely will read it again, but maybe in a year or two.

The story begins with the day of Henry's death, and then proceeds both backward and forward, with frequent spikes into the far future. (Often you learn how a character is going to die - sometimes violently and soon, sometimes peacefully in seventy years.) It's an extremely digressive book, and despite not being all that long, feels like a vast book, too, in a good way. A new chapter is often telling the story of a character who's been in the background til then, and in some cases, doing a different thing than the rest of the book is. (If anyone has a strong reading of the magic-realist-feeling Job chapter, I would be curious to hear it.)

The title refers to the many small worlds the book's set in. Overseer Moses, who knows the plantation where he's enslaved well enough that he can taste the soil and know what it means for the crops, but is helplessly lost if he goes a mile from its borders. And the social worlds of slavery, which people can't see out of.

The book jumps about in place and time, constantly digressing in small ways, flashing forward to the future lives and deaths of its innumerable characters. This helps make the book bearable, in a way, as it's constantly looking at a world beyond slavery. Its narration is able to cross the border of the various known worlds, and look back on them from other places and from after abolition. That also emphasizes the contingency of everything in the book. Slave-owners could free their slaves; slaves could take the risk of running North. The book is very good on the matter-of-fact reasons why they don't. A good number of the slave-owning characters say things like, "Well, slavery is bad, but I'll do it really well. It will be different. It will be okay owning this person who's basically a best friend/daughter to me." Or they simply find freeing slaves terribly awkward. Or, as Henry himself more or less says at one point, "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

~

And now I am reading Tripoint, only it instantly overwhelmed me with its uncomfortable emotional dynamic so I switched to The Incandescent. And at work I am rereading Hexwood. I am never sure from reread to reread how much I'm going to like Hexwood. I think it has the problem of deferring most of the reasons for caring about what's going on until after the first third, but I just got past the first third and am encountering them again.