62 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
by urbanization and local despotism in
the aftermath of the country’s bloody
revolution and ensuing Cristero War.
But in “Inland” the presence of the su
pernatural never satisfyingly coalesces
around a larger meaning—Obreht re
minds us that the supposed vacant land
scapes of the early West were haunted
like any other, but her rendering lacks
the specificity that helped make Rulfo’s
metaphor so compelling.
Similarly, the novel’s few instances
of violence—hallmark moments in any
Western—often feel predictably casual,
with few enduring consequences. When
a former lawman confronts Lurie about
the death of the young man he killed,
Lurie maintains his innocence. The law
man, attempting to stir his humanity,
describes how his victim “took fever and
soiled himself and screamed for weeks
in his sleep” before finally succumbing
to his injuries, but Lurie remains un
shaken. “Whether for spite or coward
ice,” he says of this exchange, “I could
not bring myself to give him peace.” For
someone afflicted by visions of the dead,
he is remarkably ambivalent about
the human life he has extinguished,
proving himself to be as stoic as nearly
anyone in the West’s deep pantheon of
cowboys and outlaws. Yet even as Lurie
approaches archetype we are reminded
that, as an immigrant, he has been made
to murder pieces of his original self ever
since his arrival in America.
Obreht does not engage in the usual
task of the revisionist Western, seeking
to correct heroic fairy tales with infu
sions of compromised morality and vi
olent grit. Her contribution is often play
ful in tone; we are far from Cormac
McCarthy. But “Inland” still examines
with great seriousness the line between
reinvention and erasure. When Lurie ar
rives at the frontier, we first imagine that
an immigrant with little memory of his
past has been provided with a quintes
sential blank slate. But once he falls in
with the camel drivers he is given a win
dow into how they are being absorbed
into the dominant cultural order that
they and their camels are helping to usher
forth. The notion of assimilation, Obreht
seems to suggest, was one of the first
American ideas to arrive on the frontier,
subsuming immigrant culture at the same
time that it sought to rid the land of its
original inhabitants.
The most charismatic of the camel
eers is known to the Army officers (and
to American history) as Hi Jolly, an Angli
cized pronunciation of his Arabic name,
Hadji Ali. A Syrian Turk born Filip Tedro
in the city of Izmir, he assumed the name
Hadji Ali only after completing the sa
cred Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca that
entitles one to return home bearing the
honorific hadji. In the American West,
however, the pilgrim becomes a pioneer.
Perhaps as a small act of reclamation, Ali
quietly sets about helping Lurie recog
nize his own obscured origins. The name
of Lurie’s father, he reveals, carried an
adaptation of the same title borne by Ali:
known as Hadziosman in Bosnia, he
would, elsewhere in the Muslim world,
have been known as Hadji Osman. “Are
you a Turk, after all?” Ali asks. It is a ques
tion Lurie never answers.N
ora, for her part, discovers that the
frontier she is helping to “bring
order” to is invested in her womanly in
dependence only to the extent that it
helps clear the way for a fuller imple
mentation of settler society—a society
that promises to reëstablish the same
expectations of submission she left be
hind when she came West. Nora fully
grasps the undesirability of the more
autonomous, “masculine” qualities she
has developed on the frontier while lis
tening to her husband, Emmett, tell
their two elder sons that he wants them
to cultivate the affection of “ladies” rather
than “hard women.” Reflecting on her
husband’s kitchen musing, Nora comes
to a realization:Emmett had managed to bypass her whole-
sale. He not only failed to see her as a lady—
he wouldn’t even trouble himself with the com-
parison. She was a tough, opinionated, rangy,
sweating mule of a thing, and the sum total of
her life’s work was her husband of twenty years
enumerating what he desired for his sons—
which did not include a companion with her
qualities, but did include moving to a more fa-
vorable clime to secure the affections of a per-
son with not one-half of Nora’s merits.In one of the book’s most riveting
passages, Nora remembers how, recently
arrived in Arizona, she fled her home in
panic at the menacing sight of a shad
owy rider on the horizon. Alone with
her infant daughter, she became con
vinced that the figure was an Apache
scout leading a raid to ravage her household. “She thought Apache,” Obreht
writes, “because the word had been grow
ing in her like an illness all her life.”
Nora hides in the long grass near their
home, splayed out in the full glare of the
sun, her baby overheating beneath her
body. The next day, with the rider long
gone, her daughter dies in the care of the
town doctor. To everyone who asks, Nora
forever blames the tragedy on an unseen
band of marauding Indians, even after
she realizes that the dark figure on horse
back had been her Mexican neighbor,
coming to share a loaf of bread. The vi
olent prospect of an Indian raid, “a death
foretold to her every day,” was a narra
tive more easily imagined by both her
and the scattered settlers who made up
her community.
The fraught inheritance of story pro
vides for an unresolved tension at the
center of “Inland” that lingers even after
the novel ends. The legacy of myth and
history, after all, is still written with con
founding glory and ruin all across Amer
ica’s longsettled frontier. The Arizona
town where I come from—perhaps a
future likeness of Obreht’s Amargo—
still clings to its bygone cowboy iden
tity. Growing up there, I, too, was en
couraged to define myself solely by those
terms. Often, my name served as the
only outward reminder of my remote
Mexicanness—but, like Lurie, I barely
grasped the significance of names. In
middle school, I even developed a strange
rivalry with a boy named Jesus. One day,
goaded by my white friends, we fought
each other at recess. As we were pulled
apart, he spat on me. In return, I called
him a dirty Mexican, almost without
thinking. It was the first insult that bub
bled up in me. It had, after all, been grow
ing in me like an illness all my life.
Who belongs in the West? With “In
land,” Obreht reminds us that the future
resonance of the Western is rooted in a
continuing revision of its terms, and in
an expanding notion of who might oc
cupy its center. Propelled by her vision
of selfauthorship and mythmaking, the
novel probes the limits of the American
Western, even as it sometimes displays
them. The writer’s task, Obreht knows,
is to untether oneself from predetermined
notions and stand like young Toby be
fore old disturbances, imagining that
something wholly unfamiliar might still
be encountered in the distance.