Book Review: "Butcher's Crossing"
By John Williams, 1960
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Score/10: Strong 2. Not recommended.
This book begins with two epigraphs from Emerson and Melville, and they wholly contain its argument and action. Read them and think about them, you will have a much richer and profitable experience than had you went on with the novel. Here they are:
"...everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with more assurance in that pure October weather which we distinguish by the name of the Indian summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he takes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her." Nature, Emerson
and
"Aye, and poets send out the sick spirit to green pastures, like lame horses turned out unshod to the turf to renew their hoofs. A sort of yarb-doctors in their way, poets have it that for sore hearts, as for sore lungs, nature is the grand cure. But who froze to death my teamster on the prairie? And who made an idiot of Peter the Wild Boy?" The Confidence Man, Herman Melville
The story starts in Kansas of 1870s because the protagonist is inspired by Emerson. The plot is his discovery of the meaning of Melville’s epigraph, depicted literally, one member of his team becomes an idiot and another one dies, both “by nature.”
The characters are defined by their single qualities only, over and over again: the protagonist feels unsure about his desires except that he wants to have an adventure in the western frontier, he never develops out of this miasma. The leader of the team is singularly obsessed accomplishing the mission as he envisioned it in his mind for so long, he lashes out by its failure mindlessly. The skinner loves his creature comforts, and so on. The unvaried repetition wears out quick their thin painting. None of them are ever affected by what happens to them (the action), and neither do they form a dynamic with each other (the argument). Their speeches are empty of Socratic dialectic. The prose is plain, and the plot is unsatisfactory. It fails to achieve any of the excellencies this art form possesses. But it is not exceptionally bad or boring or unpleasant to read through. It is not vulgar or adolescent. If Blood Meridian is an apex masterpiece of the Western genre of true literature, then this is the nadir.
Its pedestrian qualities appeal to men who lack depth and taste, who still want to affect “seriousness,” therefore we do not feel surprised when we read about the reception of this book, discovering that it was given high praise, since we live in times where the animating principle of democracy is the hatred of genius and desire to level everything rare and sublime.
The world would gain much by forgetting this novel.