NP Warlock (1959)

[Paul Mackin]

On Apr 16, 2006, at 3:00 PM, jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> 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.


Didn't much sound like Keith was intendin' to

Any idiot, even one like me who hasn't even read the book, will be  
struck in the face by the above post's disingenuousness..

But perhaps I'm missing the point and the whole thing is intended as  
nothing but a big joke.

Yes, that has to be the key to jbor.





>
> 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") [...]
>