Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West by Bryce Andrews (review)

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• Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West by Bryce Andrews
• Jennifer Schell

Bryce Andrews, Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West. New York: Mariner Books, 2023. 256 pp. Hardcover, $28.99; e-book, $12.99.

Ever since its release in 2018 Yellowstone has increased in popularity, accruing viewers and spinoffs at a rapid rate. Though this gritty neo-Western contains compelling characters—John, Beth, and Rip—and addresses complex issues—land, history, and family—it is perhaps more noteworthy for its refusal to grapple with the problematic connection between firearms and certain forms of American masculinity. In his thoughtful and perceptive memoir, Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West, Bryce Andrews is willing to do what the creators of the series are not. For this reason his book represents a welcome antidote to Yellowstone and its depiction of Montana as a brutal, violent place filled with murderous, armed men.

Andrews begins his memoir by describing those life events and cultural artifacts that helped to define his initial perception of and relationship with the US West. Thus, in chapter 1 he discusses learning to shoot prairie dogs at the age of eleven on the ranch of a family friend. Later he describes his fascination with Clint Eastwood's movies and Charles Marion Russell's paintings, many of which portray proud, self-reliant men, riding their horses across vast stretches of [End Page 91] rugged rangeland. Noting that guns were always a part of this "Western fantasy," Andrews explains,

The actual weapons are heavier than most people imagine and more beautiful. They glint and shine: refined machines with trigger, sear, springs, and hammer arranged in hidden synchronicity; marvels of engineering that fit the human hand better than a glove. In many of the stories I heard when I was young, such guns were magic wands, instruments of justice, and protection against the wilderness. They were blued-steel links to our heroic past.

(9)

Striking for its aestheticized description, this passage captures the seductive appeal of guns, the mysterious attributes that make them so attractive to so many Americans. It also serves to further define the contours of certain popular and enduring cultural myths about the role of violence in the settlement of the US West.

After Andrews inherits a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolver from his grandfather, he begins to experience a series of epiphanies that prompt him to reconsider his appreciation of firearms and their place in the American cultural and historical imagination. Recognizing the legacy of violence that he inherited from his settler colonial ancestors, he decides to seek reconciliation with the land and its inhabitants, both those who are human and those who are not. As part of the process, he talks with Germaine White, the former director of education for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. She advises him to honor his forebearers and prepare a ceremony. Instead of appropriating or adapting Salish traditions for his own purposes, Andrews apprentices himself to a local blacksmith, who teaches him the skills necessary to transform his grandfather's gun into a tree-planting spade. Integral to his ecological restoration work on his farm, this tool allows him to embark upon what he calls "one of many possible beginnings of better centuries to come" (248).

Punctuated with personal photographs and lyrical paragraphs, Holding Fire represents a remarkable achievement, for it challenges the link between gun violence and masculine identity that is so often taken for granted in the Western as a genre. In frank, unsparing prose, Andrews depicts the toxic cocktail of rage, fear, and insecurity inherent in this popular and powerful construction of masculinity. [End Page 92] Though he often comments on the impact of this ideal on other men, he also shares his own emotional difficulties, his regret about shooting prairie dogs, his grief over euthanizing a sick horse, his guilt about his colonial ancestry, and his struggle with suicidal ideation. Importantly though, Andrews does not settle for observing and interrogating a problem; rather, he offers readers a solution to it, and therein lies the value of his memoir. As he demonstrates, American men need not cling to their guns—as they do...