NP Warlock (1959)

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Thanks Keith. I couldn't find that review on the web so only typed in 
some of the excerpts which were relevant to the discussion, those being 
(1) that O'Brien rates the movie as pretty good (which it is), and (2) 
that the novel itself is in (and Oakley even situates it in) the genre 
of pulp westerns. (And that Hall's dialogue clunks like hell, which is 
part of what Pynchon and Farina liked so much about it.)

That genre westerns are different from other types of "literature" is 
stating the obvious, isn't it? Doesn't make them intrinsically inferior 
though. Literary snobs can turn up their noses, but it's far more 
accurate to say that _Warlock_ fits into the Zane Grey/Louis L'Amour 
tradition rather than into the Dostoevsky/Joyce tradition.

It's a good read, but does tend to get overrated here (e.g. "better 
than Blood Meridian"), which sets up a false expectation.

No need to apologise by the way.

best

On 17/04/2006:

> http://www.bookforum.com/archive/dec_05/obrien.html

>> 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") 
>> [...]