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Again, I’m skipping–mostly a bunch of YA and juvenile graphic novels which I read while house- and dog-sitting for my cousin. I also watched way too many movies and avoided grading, so while it wasn’t the most productive time ever, it was a fun break.
And now, on to . . .
Full title: Doc: a novel
Author: Mary Doria Russell (1950- )
Year Published: 2011
Book Source: Bought used
Publisher’s summary: “The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon-filled cow town jammed with liquored-up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers. Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of a mixed-blood boy named Johnnie Sanders is discovered, his death shocks a part-time policeman named Wyatt Earp. And it is a matter of strangely personal importance to Doc Holliday, the frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who has just opened an office at No. 24, Dodge House.
And that is where the unlikely friendship of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp really begins—before Wyatt Earp is the prototype of the square-jawed, fearless lawman; before Doc Holliday is the quintessential frontier gambler; before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral links their names forever in American frontier mythology—when neither man wanted fame or deserved notoriety.
Authentic, moving, and witty, Mary Doria Russell’s fifth novel redefines these two towering figures of the American West and brings to life an extraordinary cast of historical characters, including Holliday’s unforgettable companion, Kate. First and last, however, Doc is John Henry Holliday’s story, written with compassion, humor, and respect by one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.” (From the front flap–still long, even after cutting the longest paragraph!)
My thoughts: I actually own Russell’s complete works, on the strength of multiple, very favorable reviews, but I hadn’t actually read any when my new random method of choosing an unread book (it involves repeated die-rolling) landed me on her section of the shelf. This one seemed appealing for some reason, so I picked it up first. And while I can’t say whether this was the best choice, it was certainly a good one.
I knew practically nothing about Dr. Holliday when I started this book. I had, of course, heard of Wyatt Earp as a prototypical Western lawman and of the Tombstone incident as a folkloric event, but otherwise, I had no preconceived notions of the historic figures involved in this novel, so I can’t say whether Russell succeeds in honoring or contradicting the usual versions of them. I did feel like these characters were real people, and I was surprised to note just how many of the characters were actually men and women who lived and died as the novel indicates.
And among those is our young dentist-hero: Russell had really done something special here. I’ve never experienced so viscerally just what it must have been like to live with tuberculosis; it’s often in the background of Victorian novels, but the sheer awfulness of the disease and the sense of impending doom it must give its sufferers was never as clear to me as it became in this novel. Though Holliday is not defined by his illness, it shapes him irreversibly, coloring his perceptions of the world and of those around him; he had “spent his entire adult life dying,” as Russell notes, and although that’s true of us all, we rarely know it so well.
But this book isn’t all about dying; it’s also very much about living and what it meant to live in the West, what the appeal of that nebulous and ever-shifting borderland was to those who haunted the borderlands of civilization. And, yes, it’s about lovely writing, too; Russell is the sort of author whose prose begs for adjectives like “lyrical” and “haunting,” though as it’s nearly all in the service of plot and characterization, I’ve no objections. Purple passages do bore me, as a rule, but once I’m immersed in a character’s life, they become enjoyable. By the end, I had nearly brought to tears on several occasions, and I felt a little sad to leave these people who died a hundred years before I was born. That’s the best, I think, that can be said for historical fiction–that it makes the people who preceded us feel just as real as ourselves and makes their choices and lack thereof as real as our own. I guess maybe it’s about perspective and empathy. Whatever it is, I very much appreciated it in this novel.
In short: A moving, character-driven historical novel well worth reading, even for those who don’t read Westerns.
Reading at whim 