In both books, Russell’s line-to-line invention occasionally flags. Like Doc, Epitaph is a curious sort of page-turner, a novel to race through but also to idle in: You may come for the adventure, but you’ll most remember sticking around with her people. And how did Wyatt Earp gain the rep of a heroic gunman with the whitest of all possible hats? That’s Russell’s stirring final act, which turns on love and perseverance. Just how did a courtly sweetheart like Doc become known as one of the west’s most notorious highwaymen? Russell’s answer: politics and convenience. She’s as interested in stripping away layers of myth from Holliday and the Earps as in showing how those myths got built up in the first place. The new novel is well researched and impressively committed to its cast’s social and economic realities, and Russell takes fruitful liberties with her omniscient perspective, jumping from head to head like some determined mosquito. Russell even accords humanity to the black-hatted rustlers and politicos whose machinations draw Holliday and the Earp boys into the epochal 30-second shootout toward which Epitaph surges. “Any of you boys go with that blind prostitute?” Eddie asked. The portrait stands with the best of Doc, which illuminated the lives of Jau Dong-Sing, a/k/a “China Joe,” who ran a Dodge City laundry, and the vaudevillian Eddie Foy, who told jokes for the cowpokes: Russell sets down her story with warmth, humor, and high excitement, in the process summoning up for us the greasepaint and ritual of a traveling western theater troupe. First up is Josie Marcus, daughter of a San Francisco baker and kinda/sorta wife of a skunk of a politician. The emotional peak of Doc, a more eccentric novel than Epitaph, concerned Holliday’s acquisition of a prize horse for a broke friend.īut immediately after reintroducing Doc, Russell gets back to what actually made Doc great: her vigorous and compassionate treatment of the hearts and histories of the real-life people who in so many other westerns are just background. He’s terrific company, and in Russell’s conception a hell of a nice guy. Why You Should Read It: In Epitaph‘s first scene, Russell gives fans of Doc, her earlier western, exactly what they want: the chance to pass some time with her Doc Holliday, the Georgia gentleman gambler, dentist, and Chopin-loving pianist who at all times fights a tubercular cough and his own tendency to draw trouble. And I myself would like to see how a California peach stacks up against the Georgia variety.” He didn’t eat much either - no wonder he was so skinny! But when the waiter asked about dessert, Doc said, “Let’s have one of everything for the ladies to try. Doc himself just sipped at his bourbon whenever his cough got bad. … all four of the girls were feeling pretty shiny by the time they finished their main courses, for they were working on their second bottle of champagne. Corral, sure, but also gambling, piano playing, myth-making, tuberculosis, frontier politics, yellow journalism, preventative policing, vengeance killings, how mines work, and what it must have been like to live in a place as mad and dusty as Tombstone, including how it feels to toil all day in a sewing circle with your sisters-in-law and dream of maybe getting gussied up to go downtown for once in your life.” Yes, Russell’s almost 600-page saga delivers the gunfight goods, but that misleading subtitle would serve readers better if changed to something like “A novel of the O.K. Russell plunges readers into the hearts and fates of famous names - Doc Holliday, the Earp boys - and a grand cast of real folks who dared make a home of Tombstone, Arizona, decades before the invention of air-conditioning. Corral,” which might trick people into buying it at the airport but sells short the book’s ambition and humanity. The Gist: This sprawling, generous western is subtitled “A novel of the O.K. What You Have to Read: Mary Doria Russell’s Epitaph We swear that the ones in “You Have to Read This” are worth your eyeball time! There’s a kabillion books published each year.
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