34 The New York Review
hanging, or is it raucous and rowdy? In
the brawl in the saloon, what happens
to the mirror behind the bar? Do some
of the male characters in the book “live
by their own unflinching laws”? Do
people address each other as “mister,”
saying things like, “I think you got me
mistook for somebody else, mister”? In
a Western it’s OK, even fun, to expect
the expected.
And once in a while a trope gets the
rug pulled out from under it, refresh-
ingly. Like any frontier town, Amargo
has its doctor, but in place of the usual
booze- addled sawbones who needs a
lot of coffee before he’s sober enough
to treat anybody, Amargo’s doc is a
tall, slim, self- possessed, immaculately
dressed civic booster of Spanish origins
who, by the by, hopes to make an offer
on the Larks’ newspaper. And if we ex-
pect to be told, as is customary, that the
West is changing and the old ways will
soon be gone for good, we get instead
this rumination from Lurie after he has
been interviewed by “a writer who’d
come to the West to make something
of its stories”:He asked me what I had learned
of it all, and I told him I did not
know—which struck him as a great
profundity. Everyone he’d met had
just about one thing to say: the
land was changing fast. I supposed
it was, but what struck me most
was how much of it was staying the
same. Lean holdings, miles that
couldn’t be made unwild. That vast
and immutable want everybody,
dead or alive, carried with them all
the time.The tiger’s wife, who is small, sixteen
years old, and an outsider (the only
Muslim in a Christian village), and
who alone gets close to the tiger, has a
counterpart in Inland. Living with the
Lark family is a feckless young hired
girl named Josie, who is Emmett Lark’s
orphaned cousin. She can summon the
spirits of the dead and does so for vari-
ous townsfolk. The human husband
of the tiger’s wife, a butcher, beats her
mercilessly, again and again. It’s pain-
ful to read. Similarly, Josie gets pushed
around and disparaged by Nora, and as
the book’s two stories come together,
Josie suffers violence that leaves her
gravely injured, her leg broken almost
in half. After Nora and the sheriff
find and rescue her, they leave her in a
barn while the plot works itself out by
means of a long monologue that Mer-
rion Crace, the cattle baron, delivers to
Nora and the sheriff at Nora’s kitchen
table. Meanwhile, you’re wondering
if Josie might be going into shock or
bleeding to death out in the barn. Josie
and the tiger’s wife both endure ill
treatment that seems excessive. In The
Tiger’s Wife, it works successfully with
the plot, but in Inland (at least toward
the end), it doesn’t.A real Western ought to be lonesome,
and Obreht does lonesome beautifully.
Nora is the only capable grownup at
the family’s place for days and weeks
at a time. At the start of the book, her
husband has left to look for the itiner-
ant water- seller—terrible thirst runs
throughout the story—and he has not
returned. He appears only in flashback,
as do her older sons. In another flash-
back, Nora remembers the visits of an
old Indian woman, possibly a Navaho,who began to stop by when Evelyn was
a baby. Uninvited, the old woman held
her, but Nora was wary. The two had
no language in common. The woman
brought a blanket as a gift. Nora tried to
reciprocate or buy her off with presents
of sugar and coffee, while withholding
the baby. The standoff, never resolved,
finally angered the woman enough
that she left and never returned. Nora
feared she would send young men from
her village to get revenge.
One afternoon when her husband
was again away, Nora saw a rider on
the horizon. Thinking it was an In-
dian bent on killing her, she grabbed
Evelyn and ran into the desert to hide.
In her terror she lay on the ground in
the sun for hours, and the baby became
so overheated that she later died. The
rider turned out to be a neighbor bring-
ing a loaf of bread. The incident, kept
secret in its full details from the rest of
the community, never stops tormenting
Nora. Evelyn was a casualty of Nora’s
solitude. When she replays the tragedy,
she wishes she had just let the Indian
woman hold her daughter.
The desert—the “miles that couldn’t
be made unwild,” the “vast and immu-
table want” of which thirst is only one
symptom—creates a huge lonesome-
ness all on its own. After the camel
drinks his fill, he can go seven days
without water, much longer than oxen
or horses can, and that means he and
his rider can cruise places out of the
reach of most. When threatened, they
take off to where they can’t be fol-
lowed. One day the camel gets sick, and
some desperadoes who happen to be in
their vicinity suggest that the Christian
thing for Lurie to do would be to kill
and butcher his animal and share some
of the meat with them. Lurie says:But as soon as that happened,
didn’t we break camp and keep
going till we reached the foothills
and the blue desert beyond? The
nights were still bitter, but the days
were as bright and lonesome as we
liked them.Echoes of classic American voices
can be heard throughout Inland, along
with strains of García Márquez. The de-
scriptions of the awkwardness of mount-
ing and riding a camel call to mind Mark
Twain’s observations on the subject,
from his travel writing. The sometimes
over- formal, stilted, and funny dialogue
might make you think of Charles Portis
and his most famous book, Tr u e G r i t.
(Nora explains her husband’s lateness
in returning: “Sometimes being in the
thick of some great excitement makes
us inattendant to the passage of time!”
In Tr u e G r i t, when Mattie Ross tells
Colonel Stonehill, the horse trader, that
she has hired Marshal Rooster Cog-
burn, the horse trader replies, “How did
you light on that greasy vagabond?”)
The fact that Obreht’s cameleer takes
the name Lurie Mattie while in Arkan-
sas, home state of Mattie Ross, may
even be a nod to Portis. Márquezian
moments occur in the descriptions of
the far- fetched achievements of the
camels, such as when the citizens of a
town bring all their possessions and
load up the strongest camel to see if he
can stand and walk while carrying such
an equipage, and he can.
Like Willa Cather, with her Bohe-
mian settlers on the Nebraska prairie,
Obreht introduces immigrants never
seen before in the West. Lurie’s fel-low cameleers are from “the Levant,”
or eastern Mediterranean. Most are
Greek, but Hi Jolly, who’s a Syrian
Turk, has made a pilgrimage to Mecca
and taken the name Hadji Ali. He and
the others, except Lurie, were real
people. There’s no reason Greeks or
Muslims or anybody can’t be in a West-
ern; it’s a synthetic genre of unlimited
flexibility. Westerns (in dime novels
and Wild West shows) began to flour-
ish just after the Civil War. America, so
recently torn apart, needed a setting in
which opposing forces—cowboys and
Indians, cattlemen and farmers, sher-
iffs and badmen—could perform their
colorful and dreamlike pageants, reach
their stylized happy endings, and make
the country seem whole again.
In the Balkan world of The Tiger’s
Wife, everybody is on one bitterly an-
tagonistic side or another, though it
doesn’t always show. After Natalia and
her fellow doctor cross the border, they
stay with an elderly couple who talk
with them tactfully about the crops, “in
order to avoid any political or religious
tangents.” The house is decorated with
clumsy paintings of the family dog; later
Natalia learns that the paintings were
done by a teenage son who was killed
by the enemy’s paramilitary. When a
surviving son tells his story to Natalia,
“he could have said, your paramilitary,
but he didn’t,” she recalls. “I kept wait-
ing for him to say it, but he didn’t, and
then I let him not say anything, and I
didn’t say anything, either.”
A sense of irrevocable division also
fills the end of Inland. By then, the
adults closest to Nora have been re-
vealed as schemers, victims, or col-
laborators. E pluribus unum hardly
obtains; the cowmen and the farmers
will never be stepping to the footlights
arm in arm and belting out, “O—o- o-
Ok- lahoma!” Lurie and Burke, hav-
ing seen a sampling of the whole West,
reach a full stop, finally, on the Larks’
ranch, near the would- be good place,
Amargo. Along the journey they’ve
passed by hundreds of the dead, who
are themselves an atomized com-
munity. The want- filled dead souls
haunting the West can see and yearn
toward the living, but they can’t see one
another.
Earlier, when Lurie learned that a
fellow cameleer had gone back East to
fight in the Civil War, he had felt a mo-
ment of shame at not having done so
himself. Deciding against it, he said:But I had no people outside the
Territories. No certainty, even,
that wherever you [his camel] and I
landed would be annexed to what-
ever rattlebag country would be
left to stitch back together when
the fighting was done.Lurie’s point of view is true to its mo-
ment. He couldn’t know what America
would look like after the war. In fact,
the country would reunite and grow
rich and step up to join the other em-
pires, and Queen Victoria would
meet cowboys and Indians (but no
cameleers) when Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West show came to London on its way
to dazzling the capitals of Europe.
A glorious epoch of Western half-
fantasy and half- truth would begin.
For people to see that there was more
to it—to see America as a just- barely-
stitched- together country underneath,
as Obreht does—would take a while
longer. QPrices above do not include shipping and handling.
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