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Forget every stereotype you may hold about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp.\u00a0 Forget you may not even like \u201cwesterns.\u201d\u00a0 Read Doc, the 2011 historical novel by Mary Doria Russell:\u00a0 you\u2019ll be richly rewarded.<\/p>\nForget every stereotype you may hold about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp.\u00a0 Forget you may not even like \u201cwesterns.\u201d\u00a0 Read Doc, the 2011 historical novel by Mary Doria Russell:\u00a0 you\u2019ll be richly rewarded.<\/p>\n
No need for me to add another in-depth review to the many enthusiastic ones found in the Washington Post<\/a>, the Washington Times<\/a> (they agree for a change), and in a dozen other publications and 36\u00a0 screens worth of reader comments on Amazon.\u00a0 Instead, in the course of several blog posts, I\u2019ll dissect a few passages that especially intrigue me.<\/p>\n If I love a book, I\u2019ll read it a second time as a writer, asking myself how the author manages to make me cry or laugh or keep turning pages far past my bedtime.\u00a0 It\u2019s how I hone my own craft.<\/p>\n In Doc<\/em>, Russel uses the omniscient voice.\u00a0 That\u2019s where the author is the narrator, the all-knowing guide who dips in and out of different characters\u2019 heads and tells the reader things about them they don\u2019t know about themselves, and who interjects her own opinions about their circumstances, motivations, and the setting in which the story unfolds, present, past and sometimes future.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve never tried writing from this point of view myself\u2014too intimidating.\u00a0 You have to be cocksure of your ability keep the characters straight in your readers\u2019 heads, and confident that your narrator\u2019s voice is entertaining enough to justify taking the reader on excursions outside of your character\u2019s heads and your main story line.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s an example from Doc.\u00a0 In the middle of an episode involving Johnnie Sanders, a young Indian-black half breed who\u2019s a whiz at cards and later, the victim of a murder, Russel drops this bit of interpretive history:<\/p>\n “Johnnie Sanders\u2019 daddy had told no lies.\u00a0 The Indians were crazy gamblers.\u00a0 For numberless centuries and uncounted generation, the Choctaw, the Zuni, the Crow, the Arapahoe, the Navajo, the Dakota, the Mandan, the Kiowa, and a hundred other tribes had whiled away countless days and nights playing a thousand games, betting on anything with an outcome that was not assured.\u00a0 Blame boredom.\u00a0 Blame the timeless unrelieved monotony of land so devoid of tress that owls burrow in the ground for want of better accommodation.\u00a0 Blame vast herds of ceaselessly chewing ruminants who walked with the unsyncopated beat of a Lakota chant.\u00a0 However you explained it, never and nowhere else on earth had gambling occupied the attention of so many for so long as in this flat and featureless land.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Then in a geological instant\u2014just five years\u2019 time\u2014the American bison had been replaced on the prairies by European domestic cattle.\u00a0 Dead red Indians made way for live white bankrupts lured west by the promise of a fresh start on land free for the grabbing.\u00a0 Kate had watched it happen and felt no pity.\u00a0 The Indians all but wiped out?\u00a0 Good riddance.\u00a0 A danger eliminated, nothing more.\u00a0 Millions of buffalo rotting on the plains.\u00a0 Who cares?\u00a0 They were filthy brutes, huge and stupid.<\/em>“<\/p>\n Neither Johnnie Sanders nor his daddy have any clue about all this; it\u2019s clearly the author speaking.\u00a0 Does this daring tangent take you out of the flow of the narrative?\u00a0 It didn\u2019t for me.\u00a0 I found it nearly as riveting as the story itself, a way of looking a Plains Indians I\u2019d never considered.<\/p>\n But note how, in the second paragraph, Russell brings us back into the head of Kate, Doc Holiday\u2019s partner and lover, so we see the tribes\u2019 decimation through her uncaring eyes.\u00a0 We\u2019re back into the story again, having enjoyed the brief side trip into history\u2014a well written one at that.<\/p>\n Moral:\u00a0 If you\u2019re going to use the omniscient voice, make sure your side tracks are compelling and your story train returns to the main track without much delay.<\/p>\n Doc Holliday’s grave in Glenwood Springs, CO.<\/p><\/div>\n Next:\u00a0 Boxing on the frontier<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Forget every stereotype you may hold about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp.\u00a0 Forget you may not even like \u201cwesterns.\u201d\u00a0 Read Doc, the 2011 historical novel by Mary Doria Russell:\u00a0 you\u2019ll be richly rewarded. No need for me to add another in-depth review to the many enthusiastic ones found in the Washington Post, the Washington Times […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[61,110,108,109,105,89,60],"class_list":["post-1722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-of-the-american-west","tag-doc-holliday","tag-gambling","tag-gunfight-at-the-ok-corral","tag-indians","tag-mary-doria-russell","tag-wild-west","tag-wyatt-earp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1722"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1734,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722\/revisions\/1734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Doc-Holiday-grave-small.jpg\")