Work of Art

The title is bad, the picture on the cover is a calamity, but the book is three reading hours of joy.

This novel is not a “western,” although it is about the West. Immersed in clichés, it is striking for its lack of them. Charles O. Locke tells smashingly of a young cowhand doomed. He does it in sentences as blunt as revolver butts, as authentic as life. If they lack redolence, that may be the book’s felix culpa.