Oakley Hall's Warlock

[Robert Mahnke]

Browsing the NYRB catalog, I notice high praise from TRP for Oakley Hall's
novel, Warlock, with echoes of AtD:

 

"Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a
never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the
opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral
takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his
very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full,
mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter
named Blaisdell who . . . is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a
committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he
cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him,
but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the
image to exist. . . . Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with-the
rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for
political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal
crises of those in power-the collective awareness that is Warlock must face
its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and
order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and
assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep
sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels.
For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy
wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and
we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of paper,
still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall." -Thomas Pynchon

 

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?product_id=4821
<http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?product_id=4821&product_name=Warlock>
&product_name=Warlock

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070508/855a62bf/attachment.html>