NPR. It was a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Award for First Fiction. Wascom was awarded the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for Fiction and selected as one of Gambit‘s 40 Under 40. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he directs the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University.
Wascom's new novel is The Great State of West Florida.
At Lit Hub he tagged five favorite Neo-Westerns, including:
Robin McLean, Pity the BeastRead about another book on the list.
If I was pressed at sixgun-point to name my favorite novel of the last decade and my favorite living American writer, the answer to both questions is Pity the Beast by Robin McLean. When this book came out there should’ve been celebrations in the streets, because here at last we have a writer squaring up with the grim violent Western tale and its practitioners not on their terms, but on hers.
McLean does so many things in her fiction that make her, for my money, peerless, but one of the most characteristic and thrilling aspects of her work is that she never, ever forgets the natural world and relentlessly scales her human characters against it in such a way that they are alternately reduced by the majesty and indifference of nature, but also enlarged by that sense of scale. Her characters aren’t archetypes, even though many see themselves as such, they don’t tower andloom over the landscape, but set against such a masterfully rendered landscape, they sure do stand tall.
And, most importantly for me, here we have some of the most heartstopping sentences I’ve ever read. Set in the American West of the present day, we follow Ginny, a rancher who’s assaulted by her husband and neighbors and left for dead, but survives and takes up rifle and horse, hitting the trail to outrun her pursuers, who want her silenced and worse—this one’s as close to a traditional Neo-Western as anything on this list.
But saying so risks reducing a novel that contains a galaxy of voices, times, and tones, one that can speak in the voice of the pop-culture Western (often literally, in the voice of a TV narrator and shows like Gunsmoke), of a team of pack mules, and of far-future arboreal census-takers hovering over a radically changed and peaceful Earth. McLean isn’t leapfrogging POVs for the sake of pure pyrotechnics; each jump is built on the characters of the novel and how they see themselves, their interior lives, their fantasies. It’s utterly marvelous, and the sheer verve and excitement of the whole thing manages to balance the truly ugly events of the opening chapters.
Roberto Bolaño once described a classic as a book that’s able to decode or reorder the canon, and for my money Pity the Beast is a classic. But McLean’s novel does so much more than repurpose or critique the canonical elements of the western or the revenge story, it does another thing Bolaño says classics do, it “ventures into new territory and in some way enriches (that is, illuminates) the tree of literature and smooths the paths for those who follow.”
You read a book like Pity the Beast and suddenly you’re one of the other runners in the world after Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, thrillingly aware that what you once believed to be impossible is actually achievable. There’s no guarantee you’ll pull it off, and I’m not sure my anime-infused pulpy bloodbath of a book does, but it’s fun as hell to chase that feeling, and that’s what kept me coming back to the page.
--Marshal Zeringue
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