Although offered as a novel, this randomly organized fictional biography of John Henry "Doc" Holliday more closely resembles the cacophonous result of a three-way collision among a thesaurus, a Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
and a well-researched history of the American frontier. The story is derivative if not imitative of other postmodern fictional efforts in the same vein, most notably Joseph Heller's God Knows
and James Carlos Blake's The Pistoleer. Literary pretensions pockmark the narrative like bullet holes in an old barn's side, and consistency, clarity and narrative flow are discarded in the name of self-conscious styling and authorial wordsmithing. Olds (Raising Holy Hell) traces the life of one of the West's most notorious characters—gambler, gunman, consumptive companion to the notorious and noteworthy—through a variety of literary devices including mock testimonials, newspaper reports, essayistic commentary, stultifying poetry and personal narrative spoken by Holliday himself. Bits of movie dialogue, song lyrics, references to television programs and other deliberate anachronisms litter the text and distract the reader almost as much as encyclopedic listings of everything from patent medicines to card games to euphemisms for prostitution. Unconventional grammar—sometimes apparently deliberate, sometimes not—also undermines Olds's attempt to provide an iconoclastic fictional account that will reveal his subject and at the same time move readers to a closer understanding of one of the West's most sensational figures: the results are more tedious than triumphant. (Aug.)
Forecast:Those who enjoyed 1995's
Raising Holy Hell, a critically lauded account of the life of John Brown, will probably be receptive to this title. But traditional western fans will not be amused, and the subject matter makes it a hard sell for readers in the mood for postmodern pyrotechnics. A more engaging and better-written portrait of Holliday can be found in Robert B. Parker's
Gunman's Rhapsody (Forecasts, May 14.)
