NP Warlock (1959)

[XXX]

jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> Hey Keith
>
> I actually liked the book, and enjoy pulp novels and serials too. I'm 
> not the one setting up the elitist distinction between "pulp fiction" 
> and "literature", nor is the reviewer.


Elitist who knows difference between pulp fiction and literature also 
knows difference between shit and shinola..

Just kidding . . . .

>
> And I'd be pretty sure O'Brien actually read the book before passing 
> judgement about it.
>
> best
>
>> Excerpts from:
>> 'The Design of the West' (review of _Warlock by Oakley Hall) by 
>> Geoffrey O'Brien.
>> _Artforum_ 12.4 (Bookforum supplement). New York: Dec 2005/Jan 2006, 
>> p. 47.
>>
>> America's great cowboy epic consists of a hundred thousand simulacra 
>> (cast in forms ranging from novels and movies to model kits and lunch 
>> boxes) of an imaginary original. At that primal point where other 
>> cultures find their Ramayana or Iliad or Le Morte d'Arthur, we make 
>> do with rumors and fabrications, replicas of wanted posters and 
>> tintypes of miners' shacks, Owen Wister and Zane Grey, and the 
>> deathless ideogram of a man on a horse crossing an empty space [...]
>>
>> So successfully does Warlock enact the necessary moves of the classic 
>> western that it was itself turned almost immediately into a very 
>> effective movie (directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Henry Fonda 
>> and Richard Widmark) which, though it drops significant chunks of 
>> Hall's convoluted narrative [...]
>>
>> The hiring of a celebrated gunslinger -- Clay Blaisedell, with his 
>> goldhandled Colts, an enigmatic character already half-legendary 
>> thanks to the efforts of a burgeoning dime-fiction industry -- to 
>> defend the town against the cowboys initiates a series of violent 
>> confrontations and brutal reversals of loyalty that at each turn 
>> promise the town a redemption that never quite arrives.
>>
>> It's the kind of town where men are given to saying things like, "I'm 
>> going out and drink some of the meanness out of me," or, "Never heard 
>> a man make such a fuss over getting shot." The desultory dialogue 
>> that fills the long stretches of waiting between sudden bursts of 
>> violence plays a choral role in this novel, which at times feels like 
>> some long and strange stage play. [...]
>>
>> Warlock lives by its language, which sustains a through-line of pulp 
>> narration and a heightened version of B-western repartee ("You are 
>> like a hellfire-and-damnation preacher gone loco on bad whiskey") [...]
>>
>> best
>
>
>