O.K. : the corral, the Earps, and Doc Holliday : a novel /

West has written 18 previous novels and numerous works of nonfiction, all of which display his remarkable mastery of the English language. Here, his focus is on that consumptive former dentist with the fast gun known as Doc Holliday. In this almost-biography, Doc is his own forever-thirsty, card-playing self, at his best when cared for by Katherine Haroney, the prostitute he called Big Nose Kate. Although West also deals with the events at the O.K. Corral and those grim reapers called the Earp brothers, it is the multifaceted Holliday--portrayed with a surprising poetic side--who steals the show. Although West's words are clearly things of beauty, the same cannot be said for his famous characters. In this very different western, the language is beautiful, but the people are as seamy on the page as they were in real life. --Budd Arthur

West (The Tent of Orange Mist; My Mother's Music), a prolific writer and adventurous stylist, squeezes Doc Holliday dry in a meticulously researched but overworked historical novel. The basic story is familiar. On his way from Georgia to the healthier climate of Colorado, consumptive dentist Dr. John Henry Holliday visits Dallas, East Las Vegas and Dodge, gradually abandoning dentistry as he discovers his prowess as a gunfighter and his Keatsian obsession with death. Along the way, he saves the life of Wyatt Earp, marshal and gunman. The two become fast friends and eventually land in Tombstone, Ariz., where they take part in the almost mythical 1881 gunfight between the Clanton Gang and the Earp family at the O.K. Corral. In the confusion following the shoot-out, which West describes in a perfunctory shorthand, Doc abandons Earp and spends his dying days in Colorado, a melancholic figure both feared and respected as a gunslinger. Favoring character over action, and Doc's character over anybody else's, West's depictions of Doc's sometime lover Big Nose Kate, the Clanton Gang, Wyatt Earp and even the vast western landscape are threadbare foils erected to highlight Doc's already magnified traits. In lengthy, cantilevered sentences, the writer reveals Doc's thoughts on cigar smoking or the use of "if" in conditional sentences, often in the form of letters to Doc's cousin Mattie, a cerebral cloistered nun who gropes toward her spiritual enlightenment just as Doc gropes toward his in the desert, using violence and his worsening health as vehicles of redemption. West's acrobatic proseÄladen here with Latin clich‚s, such phrases as "the ogive windows of identity," and puns ("doxology/Doc's Ology")Äis more hindrance than help, and, in this strained tale, only Doc emerges as anything more than a cipher. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

As if to emphasize further his daring range, West is publishing two historical novels and a nonfiction work (The Secret Life of Words) this spring. West, whose 18 previous novels include the superb Rat Man of Paris and admired works about Lord Byron and Jack the Ripper, now takes on two more icons: Adolf Hitler and Doc Holliday. The Dry Danube is subtitled A Hitler Forgery, and West's school of fiction has its similarities to the art of a master forger. This novella takes place just before the Great War and is told in the voice of the failed Austrian painter Hitler. Its inspired narrative is stylishly solipsistic, like the paragraphless monolog novels of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (whose influence West acknowledges in an afterword). The narrator talks obsessively and bitterly about his two artist heroes, Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, who stubbornly refuse to recognize his brilliance and cooperate as mentors. The awful knowledge of what is to come later for Hitler (and for Europe) keeps the meandering narration from losing its tension. In a surprisingly enjoyable short work, West has found a voice that speaks with fluent authority to magnify a rarely examined historical moment before the Third Reich terrors. If impersonating the young Hitler was ambitious enough, taking on the famous dentist and consumptive gunslinger Doc Holliday (and his friends the Earps) may have been too far to stretch. O.K. is mostly written in a high-flown, third-person style that verges for long stretches on being a creative essay on Holliday and company. For a novelist, the mythology of the Old West is both attractive and dangerous: sources remain so unreliable on gunfighter history that it's difficult to acquire enough knowledge of someone like Holliday to build him an interior life or find a believable voice. Instead, West stays at a distance and, to create Doc's state of mind, shuffles his thoughts among the few things that are known definitively--that he coughed up blood a lot, hailed from Georgia, shot men expertly, played faro, and kept company with a widely admired prostitute named Big Nose Kate. If Doc remains fuzzy, Wyatt Earp is vaguer still. The Earps and Holliday who fought the Clanton gang in Thomas Berger's The Return of Little Big Man (LJ 2/15/99) may have been inventions, but they were vividly human characters. O.K., while containing lyrical passages of West's astonishing prose, is largely a missed opportunity to raise Doc and friends to the author's usual level of literature. Earpists will learn little that is new about the famous showdown. For larger fiction collections.--Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The mythology of the American West has once again begun to take hold of some of our best writers' imaginations'notably so in this sharply imagined 18th novel by the versatile stylist whose widely ranging fiction includes, most recently, Life With Swan (1999). West retells a number of familiar tales, climaxing with the infamous ``Gunfight at the OK Corral'' in Tombstone, Arizona, survived by such hardy antiheroes as lawman (and murderer) Wyatt Earp, his cold-blooded brother Morgan, and the story's focal character: John ``Doc'' Holliday, the consumptive southern-born medical man and cardsharp whose restless adventuring and mastery of gunplay seem ironical accommodations to the inescapable probability of his imminent early death. The book begins awkwardly, with too many explanatory constructions (like ``torn as he was between the dandyism of the Southern dentist and the clinking leathers of theWestern shootist''). But the rhetorical ante is quickly upped, as West's exquisitely energized (if occasionally baroque) prose displays Doc Holliday's bemused fatalism, and deftly portrays the two women who impinge on his morose solipsism: ``Big Nose Kate,'' the hard-bitten whore who satisfies and loves him, but cannot persuade him to try to save his own life; and Sister Melanie Mary (formerly Doc's ``childhood sweetheart''), the poetry-writing nun with whom he inexplicably conducts a longtime long-distance correspondence. The novel's language is admirably evocative and challenging, remarkable for both its clarity (not always heretofore West's strong point) and vivid detail (e.g., in the desert ``men had cut the ears off their mules and sucked the blood from them, because there was no water''). The many lucid analyses of Doc Holliday's rotting lungs and soul achieve a masterly intensity, even when the book's meditative intensity make it an otherwise intermittently arduous read. West's enduring curiosity, energy, and ``chutzpah'' make him one of the most consistently interesting novelists at work today'and OK is one of his most interesting books.