God's Country

Womanizing and hustling, gambling and drinking, horse-rustling and cross-dressing--Everett sends up the cliches and formulae of every Western novel you ever read. And the narrator Curt Marder, part-time husband and full-time loser, adds an all-important forgotten ingredient: "I had read what I could of the dime novels about the frontier . . . and generally the little books gave a fair account, but always failed to mention the smell." That's why cowboys tended to be quiet loners: "We came together in bars and churches more or less to assure ourselves that our smells were normal and not an indication of coming death." The action begins when a band of marauders torch Marder's house and barn, kidnap his wife, and kill his dog. ("Killed your dog? What kind of heathens do we have in these parts?" "Efficient.") After gambling away the remains of his ranch, he enlists the help of the local tracker, Bubba, a pensive black farmhand with a reputation for getting things done. This unlikely duo travels the hills and vales of the Wild West, looking for Marder's captive wife--unless something more interesting crops up. Along the way, they have to avoid a country minister selling Bibles with only a few pages missing ("a bout of illness just as we pulled away from Kansas City saw the demise of most of Deuteronomy"), a two-bit hooker seeking revenge on nonpaying customers, inbred locals who will bury folks up to their necks for the entertainment value, and the spotlight-hogging swagger of the local army commander. ("My name is Colonel George A. Custer. Perhaps you've heard of me" "No, sir." "Drat.") Page after page, the one-liners and the tall tales keep coming. But about two-thirds of the way through the book the tone shifts bracingly and unexpectedly when an ever-present threat in Bubba's life penetrates the fog of Marder's irresponsible tomfoolery--that a posse of vigilantes is often more than happy to lynch the first available black man whenever a crime is discovered. The author relentlessly spoofs the racial dynamics between whites and blacks and Indians; Marder's buffoonery is brilliantly offset by Bubba's gravity and by a local tribe's apprehension. Yet the book never stops being funny: even when the satire becomes acidic and shines a light on uncomfortable truths, Everett keeps the reader laughing at the story's situational absurdities, its characters' foibles, and our own racial attitudes. "God's Country" is one of the most hilarious--and somber--Westerns I've ever read.

"God's Country" is an irreverent farce, one that peels away the romantic whitewashing (pun intended) often given to depictions of the Old West - even depictions that think they are being irreverent. Everett's characters, more often than not, are smelly, boorish, and stupid. More importantly, they are narrow-minded, violent, racist, sexist, and self-righteously hypocritical. Everett masterfully balances coarse humor, a broad and penetrating social critique, and a sympathetic portrait of the far more complex Bubba, a black tracker who struggles to maintain his independence and dignity against this hostile cultural backdrop: "All I want is one day where I ain't got to worry about a white man decidin' I looked crosswise at him, one day where I ain't got to worry just 'cause I hear a rider behind me, one day where I ain't called a boy." I was continually reminded of Mark Twain as I read this novel: it is that funny, and that smart.

This book is amazing. I read Everett's Watershed and liked it so much I had to read another one by him. Watershed and God's Country have just been reprinted together, and they are both incredible: funny, poignant, incredibly intelligent, and heart-breaking. Everett portrays America at its starkest, from the point of view of the downtrodden, with a dignity and surety it makes you shiver. The language is miraculous, and the story breathtaking. This is realistic fiction as I've always dreamt of finding.

It is this reviewer's opinion that Percival Everett's God's Country is nothing short of a mini-masterpiece. Set in 1871 and narrated by a very unlucky cowpoke, Curt Marder, the book shows the good, bad, and ugly aspects of life in God's Country (the proverbial Wild West). The story opens with marauders burning Curt's ranch, kidnapping his wife, Sadie, and committing the ultimate indiscretion of shooting his beloved dog. Curt, a spineless coward and ardent racist, does nothing to stop them and watches from a distance as his home is destroyed. He hires Bubba, the best tracker in the area (who happens to be African American), to lead him to the culprits (and subsequently Sadie) in exchange for half the ranch. It is in the journey to save Sadie that Curt constantly witnesses and benefits from Bubba's selfless acts of benevolence and humanity, but is blinded by racism, stupidity, and ignorance to realize the errors of his ways. Instead, he consistently lies, steals, and cheats, largely driven by greed and his own self-interests. Mr. Everett is an excellent writer having pulled off such a spoofy odyssey. Through his words, the reader experiences the sights, sounds, and smells of hard living in hard times. It is a relatively short novel that is richly saturated with dark humor and unforgettable, wonderfully imagined characters with names like Wide Clyde McBride, Pickle Cheeseboro, and Taharry whose speech impediment causes him to preface every word with "ta," thus earning him his unusual name. The book even includes a "cameo" appearance of "Injun killin'" George Cluster and bank robbers reminiscent of the James/Younger Gang. This book touched on so many issues (the "isms") on a number of levels. Through the misadventures of Curt and Bubba, the author covers the institutionalized racism and social injustices that Native, Asian, and African Americans endured. There are painful scenes of an Indian tribe massacre and a lynching of an innocent black boy. The sexism exhibited against women in the West was evidenced in the Jake and Loretta storylines, and the emerging socio-economic strata (classism) between western landowners was touched upon as well. However, for me, the most powerful messages were saved in the last few pages of the novel's surprise ending. Without revealing too much, I thought it was clever in the way that the author paralleled Bubba's "dream" to live freely without fear or judgment to MLK's desire to be judged by the content of one's character and not by skin color. Curt comments that Bubba's dream did not sound like much of a dream summed up the underlying arrogance and indifference toward his fellow man that resonated throughout the story.This is the second book I have read by this author and I have not been disappointed yet. I am looking forward to picking up his other works as time permits.Reviewed by PhyllisAPOOO BookClub, The Nubian Circle Book ClubJuly 19, 2003