A great, short western.
It's an unbelievable stroke of luck to be living when both Robert Olmstead and Cormac McCarthy are writing. To get one writer of these sorts of minimal, violent, pretty books would be a pretty decent stroke of luck. So to have two is almost more luck than anyone really deserves.
What I love about this book is that it's a western, but it defies what I consider the traditional stereotypes of westerns. For the most part, I've read westerns that are long and literary, and westerns that are short and trashy. But this one takes the literary, cuts it down to a manageable length, and the result is pretty damn good.
I sometimes wonder if authors of westerns feel that the length of the book, the expansiveness, helps encapsulate the expansiveness of the landscape and all of that. Olmstead take a different tack, and the shortness and brutality of the book matches well with the shortness and brutality of the characters' lives.
Just don't mistake this witholding for a lack of generosity on the part of the author and his storytelling. Everything that needs to be there is. Everything that doesn't is in a Longarm somewhere.
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