Website review: American By Blood
Teiresias discovered this in Literature
•1 reviews since Apr 15, 2008
literature
•bostonreview.net/BR25.1/onan.html
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Teiresias discovered 3 months ago- American By Blood Google e-book link Review by Stewart O'Nan for Boston-Review For the novelist, as for any artist, the difficulty of taking on well-trodden territory is to overcome those past representations that the audience is most familiar with, to either pointedly avoid or consciously reinterpret the existing iconography. The artist has to demystify or put a wicked spin on the material, make it new or do it better. In American By Blood, first novelist Andrew Huebner sets himself an almost impossible task, choosing that most-overworked of landscapes, the American West late in the US government's war against the Indians. His approach, while accomplished and pleasing in its application, may signal a new school of American writing and also serve as a kind of cautionary tale of its own. The novel opens with a brutal set-piece, the discovery by cavalry scouts of the battlefield at Little Big Horn. As they wander through the devastation, three men in the party are singled out: Lieutenant Bradley, Private August Huebner, and another odd and wild private ironically named Gentle. Huebner has imagined this world brilliantly, his concrete details strong and evocative: There was blood in the dirt in sticky dark pools around each of the fallen that gathered in rivulets, recedes and indents of the landscape. There seemed to be blood even in the sky and wind. The scouting party had the hankies over their noses for the smell. They closed their eyes. Some of them retched right off their horses. They could not guard or flush their hearts. Hands, heads, torsos, feet and legs, eyeballs, fingers and cocks cut off and scattered about, stiffening into grotesque and obscure mockeries of life. Birds hovered overhead, squawking horribly. The bodies were bloodied, swollen and discolored from two days in searing sun, covered by pulsing masses of flies. A Bible had been ripped apart, strewn to the wind. They saw odd pages, stuck to bloody scalp-shed faces, floating in the hot breeze. Bradley tried to gather them up, got a pile together then stopped and threw them up in the air. It seemed really important at first, then it wasn't anymore. The bodies were left for rot on an earth tired and scarred by the fury of their dying. The action is episodic, battles followed by lulls followed by patrols, a new ambush, a retreat, a raid, and the storyline naturally wanders in the middle sections of the book, following as it does the scouts' unsteady progress. The line writing is near flawless throughout, a triumph. And yet, in their terse, sensual poetry, in the way they describe men in a violent and awesome world without delving deeply into character, Huebner's sentences (and attitude) are too familiar. Like Kent Haruf in Plainsong, the author comes close to mimicking the Cormac McCarthy of All the Pretty Horses. Literary fiction writers usually choose a certain point of view and tone because those offer the best, sometimes the only way to investigate the singular inner lives of their characters. For Nick Adams, numb from the war, his emotional world leveled, communion with the world of others unbearable. All that said, Huebner's line writing and eye serve him well. American By Blood is more eventful and finally deeper than All the Pretty Horses,and Huebner doesn't pour on the mock-Faulknerian rhetoric as McCarthy sometimes does.
