William J Cobb on books & film

So Stephen Graham Jones is at it again, offering us a new, seriously weird novel with the kickass title of It Came From Del Rio. I just started it and don’t want to give too much away, but it’s not exactly Catcher in the Rye, featuring instead a narrator named Dodd, who I imagine speaks in a voice like Jack Nicholson’s, and who has a connection to the legendary chupacabra of South Texas fame. As with most all Jones’s fiction, it starts with a rip, hits the page running, and leaves your head spinning. Here’s a passage for all the animal lovers:
“Because I didn’t have any clothes, and because the rabbit dead on the floor had been my god, I stripped his skin off, used it to bandage my own. And then, because I had a taste for it now, I ate as many of his organs as I could scoop out. His muscle was too tough, though, and for some reason trying to tear it with just my fingers, it felt like sacrilege. But the kidneys and heart and liver, they were enough.”—p102

For the last two days I’ve had the good fortune of a visit from novelist Kent Haruf, who gave a reading on our campus last night. Kent’s a natural raconteur (I’ve been waiting years to use that word) and told the audience how he grew up in eastern Colorado, the son of a Methodist preacher, and couldn’t wait to leave the high plains, about which he said, “It’s flat, treeless, unpopulated, and windy most all the time.” Once he left, to live in Turkey as a Peace Corps worker teaching English to rural students who “would probably never use it again in their life, and didn’t need it,” and to serve as a conscientious objector in the Vietnam War, he later came to miss Colorado and the high plains, which now he admits, “It’s not pretty, but it’s beautiful.”
All this explains his focus on the fictional (or mythic) town of Holt, Colorado, the setting for all his novels—The Tie That Binds (1984), Where You Once Belonged (1990), Plainsong (1999), and Eventide (2004). I was surprised to hear that he didn’t begin publishing until into his Forties, which runs counter to the media myth of the Brilliant Young Writer. He claims to be a slow learner and made a point that he’s not so much a writer as a person learning to write. He’s a true gentleman, soft-spoken, with a somewhat raspy voice, and paid attention to others, including the many students who asked questions during the Q&A at the end of the reading.
We were lucky to be in his presence, and at a bar after the reading, I pulled out my new Kindle (which he’d never seen before) and showed him Eventide in Kindle form. But that’s probably a dangerous thing to do, for a writer—powering up your Kindle in a bar, surrounded by other writers. We argued over a sex scene in Lolita so much I ended up purchasing it (while I have probably four to five copies, including a first edition, of Lolita already), plus some Chekhov stories, just to show others how easy it was. Literary impulse purchasing! The future is now.
And another Western writer is in the news this morning: Tom McGuane has a new novel about to appear, titled Driving on the Rim. Here’s the piece in this morning’s NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/books/21mcguane.html?hpw
While I’ve never been fortunate enough to have Tom McGuane over to the house, I’ve seen him read at a small bookstore, where he was both rugged and gracious. What I remember most about him is his fiction, a scene involving illicit-love-gone-wrong at a drive-in theater making me laugh out loud. That he’s a rancher in Montana, and honors a tradition and a love of the land that I share, only makes him more interesting to me, and perhaps genuine.

Here’s my review of Bruce Machart’s debut novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, which appears today in the Dallas Morning News:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_wake_1017gd.ART.State.Edition1.333f06a.html
It’s a good novel, and I could have written much more about it, but there’s a short word count for the DMN. One thing I touched on (lightly) were two scenes of night-time horse racing. One of the blurbs (always suspicious) referred to Machart’s “exactitude.” I don’t know if he’s right or wrong, but I do know enough about horse races that if you care enough to attend one, you’d like to be able to see it. There’s firelight in the scene, naturally, but that would only reach, what? thirty to fifty feet? Much is made of the expressions on the characters’ faces as they ride hell-bent through the night, one of them being a pretty “Spanish” girl, but how could you see any expression if it’s dark? Does it really matter? It makes for a romantic scene, and much of the novel is romanticized (scratch that “exactitude”). The hardbitten, dour characters are, for instance, awfully eloquent, even though I’d guess that, from the farm work described, they don’t spend much time with any “book learnin’.” And where do these pine trees come from? The closest pines I’ve seen in central Tx are near Bastrop, but that’s pretty far from his location. As I mention, the novel seems to follow a Faulkner/Cormac McCarthy tradition, and I’m a sucker for that.