Lost in the New West: Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane by Mark Asquith (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lost in the New West: Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane by Mark Asquith Scott Pearce Asquith, Mark. Lost in the New West: Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 243 pp. Hardcover, $120; e-book, $108. Mark Asquith sees that getting lost in the West, or perhaps feeling that the West is lost, is an easy thing to do because a notion of what the West is has become uncertain and convoluted. The West, as Asquith contends, is commonly seen as a loosely defined geographical space, or a political theory, or a romantic escape, or a set of tacky images, or something of an assemblage of these. Thus, “for writers seeking to engage with the West, this identity problem is exacerbated by the long shadow cast by the Western” (7). As the subtitle suggests, Lost in the New West: Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane, Asquith is primarily concerned with four writers, John Williams, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, and Thomas McGuane, and the ways in which the West remains alive in their works and the works of others. The four chapters in this book examine how each of the four writers work to demythologize many of the classical Western genre tropes. This begins with John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing. Asquith’s work is timely given the upcoming film adaptation of Butcher’s Crossing and the uncertainty as to what that film will do with Williams’s novel. Asquith provides astute and engaging analysis and writes in such a way that this book is sure to appeal to the academic crowd and equally to those readers interested in the changing nature of the Western. In particular, Asquith discusses Williams’s work in relation to the unfettered consumption of flora and fauna and the gendered binaries that subjugate and limit social and emotional mobility. Yet, it is, conversely, as Asquith acknowledges, these very acts that have driven economic development in the West. The second chapter focuses on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy. Asquith brings a new reading to [End Page 163] McCarthy’s work, a difficult task given the plethora of articles, books, and book chapters focused on McCarthy’s body of work. Asquith finds parallels to aspects of McCarthy’s characterization and narrative in a broad range of texts, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Lonely are the Brave (directed by David Miller, 1962) to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Yet, Asquith never loses sight of the West and the focus on masculine performance in the Border Trilogy is particularly impressive. There is, seemingly, for Asquith, an inescapable West that persists in McCarthy’s work, and the work of the other writers, one that is frightening and alluring, both in its depictions and its critique of the varied constructs attached to the West. In writing about Annie Proulx, Asquith contends that “Proulx’s West remains dangerous because it is surreal; it is a potent mixture of mythology and exoticism that is both easy to idealize and fatal to underestimate” (97). And, also, that Proulx’s work gives “voice to the silent victims of a false mythology” (98). This chapter was most striking and covers many of Proulx’s short stories as well as That Old Ace in the Hole. For Asquith, Proulx’s characters are caught between an allegiance of sorts to the past and a present that has little space for them. There is a James Joyce–type paralysis for characters in Proulx’s work that Asquith again identifies as most profoundly expressed around the anxiety of incomplete masculine performance. Asquith’s examination of Thomas McGuane’s work, predominately the Deadrock novels, is terrific. Asquith again considers masculine performance but finds that in McGuane’s work there is a comical self-consciousness in the protagonists. For Asquith, there is often a determination in McGuane’s male protagonists to embody the classical Hollywood cowboy, but the Deadrock town provides limited opportunities for such performance, and they become poor facsimiles. There is, as Asquith argues, an allure in the cowboy identity, in that masculine performance so repeatedly projected onto film and TV screens, which extends beyond a...