Bucking the Tiger: A Novel [Hardcover]

Bruce Olds (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 2001

John Henry Holliday was an Ivy League-educated dentist from a genteel Georgia family when at the age of twenty-one he was diagnosed with consumption and given six months to live. Instead, over the next fifteen years, he composed of his sojourn on America's western frontier a paean to the ways in which a man might bluff death--and attain a measure of immortality.

In Bucking the Tiger, Bruce Olds uses a pan-dimensional, genre-blurring collage of original poems, reconstituted news accounts, adulterated epigraphs, song lyrics and photographs, simulated eyewitness testimony, fictionalized memoir, invented correspondence, re-imagined folk history--less to restore the past of a figure who in his lifetime was more thoroughly mythologized than Jesse James or Billy the Kid, than to re-story it entirely.

Evoking Doc Holliday's checkered careers as a frontier dentist, itinerant saloon gambler, professional faro dealer, and occasional shootist (including his involvement in the fabled gunfight at the OK Corral), Bucking the Tiger displaces the popular image of the Latin-spouting serial killer with the reality of a human being who, exiled to an emotional and physical landscape to which he was singularly unsuited, strove to make of his self-affliction an expression of sustained, if often violent, art.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although offered as a novel, this randomly organized fictional biography of John Henry "Doc" Holliday more closely resembles the cacophonous result of a three-way collision among a thesaurus, a Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and a well-researched history of the American frontier. The story is derivative if not imitative of other postmodern fictional efforts in the same vein, most notably Joseph Heller's God Knows and James Carlos Blake's The Pistoleer. Literary pretensions pockmark the narrative like bullet holes in an old barn's side, and consistency, clarity and narrative flow are discarded in the name of self-conscious styling and authorial wordsmithing. Olds (Raising Holy Hell) traces the life of one of the West's most notorious characters gambler, gunman, consumptive companion to the notorious and noteworthy through a variety of literary devices including mock testimonials, newspaper reports, essayistic commentary, stultifying poetry and personal narrative spoken by Holliday himself. Bits of movie dialogue, song lyrics, references to television programs and other deliberate anachronisms litter the text and distract the reader almost as much as encyclopedic listings of everything from patent medicines to card games to euphemisms for prostitution. Unconventional grammar sometimes apparently deliberate, sometimes not also undermines Olds's attempt to provide an iconoclastic fictional account that will reveal his subject and at the same time move readers to a closer understanding of one of the West's most sensational figures: the results are more tedious than triumphant. (Aug.)Forecast: Those who enjoyed 1995's Raising Holy Hell, a critically lauded account of the life of John Brown, will probably be receptive to this title. But traditional western fans will not be amused, and the subject matter makes it a hard sell for readers in the mood for postmodern pyrotechnics. A more engaging and better-written portrait of Holliday can be found in Robert B. Parker's Gunman's Rhapsody (Forecasts, May 14.)

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The subject of scores of books and movies for his hand in the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral, Doc Hollidaythe consumptive dentist turned cardsharp and gunfightermay have at last found his poet in Bruce Olds, whose 336-page cubist novel circles and approaches Doc from every conceivable angle: from the inside, through his lover Kate's eyes or those of acquaintances like Billy the Kid; through poetry and resonant lists of Doc's slang, manners, symptoms, sexual habits, or belongings (from ivory-handled Colts to his edition of Poe). Like Olds's collage-style novel about the apocalyptic Abolitionist John Brown, Raising Holy Hell, his portrait of Holliday is a compelling literary jumble of earthy monolog and ethereal narrative, with stray bits of research left lying about for atmosphere. (It's a Western novel that quotes Beckett.) Olds's Doc is more convincing than the uncharismatic, phlegm-hacking character of Paul West's novel OK (LJ 4/15/00). Those waiting for the Earp-Holliday gun team to take the field will have to wait several hundred word-rich, experimental pages, however, since language is as much the star here as the deadly exchange in Tombstone. But the story does slowly tilt toward the OK showdown, The way every Odyssey drifts west/ inchmeal/ towards its Iliad. An ambitious and rewarding work for all fiction collections.
- Nathan Ward, Library Journal
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (August 14, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374117276
• ISBN-13: 978-0374117276
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,315,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Doc Holliday Shines Bright In The Shadow Of Death, August 2, 2001

By 

Jeffrey J. Morey (Long Beach, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bucking the Tiger: A Novel (Hardcover)

In the popular imagination, John Henry Holliday is the fierce dark angel forever at Wyatt Earp's side. In "Bucking the Tiger", Bruce Olds tears away that public persona to reveal Holliday's ardent struggle to burn bright against the darkness. Doc Holliday's proclivities for dealing out death have been greatly exaggerated while his rage to live has gone mostly unnoticed. The reader follows Doc on his life's journey. We see John Henry's hurt and confused rage when, after his mother dies, his father remarries only a few months later. After he learns he is consumptive, we're with Doc as he goes West, takes up gambling and follows the professional circuit from Dallas to Deadwood, from Denver to Dodge City. We meet Wyatt Earp and travel to the dark and bloody town of Tombstone. We experience the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and its violent aftermath. Finally, we are there when Doc Holliday relinquishes his spirit with a quick drink and a wry joke. In covering Doc's story, Bruce Olds gives us more than just another historical novel. In this telling, Big Nose Kate Elder, Doc's inamorata, becomes a sustenance, an oasis of elan within Doc's ever diminishing life-world. When Holliday sojourned west, he didn't extend his life so much as prolong his death. "Bucking the Tiger" is thus a wide ranging reflection on mortality which refracts from Doc Holliday's life and legend back out again onto topics of universal concern. Near the end of the book, Doc writes that he "never intended for his life to resonate." But resonate it does, far beyond Doc Holliday's wildest imagination. Despite the dark subject matter, Olds provides remarkable outbursts of delightful humor. Old timer recollections of Doc are scattered throughout the book and many of these issue from characters in well known movies or TV shows. Steve McQueen's "Josh Randall" is identified as the author of "Fifty Years Spent Strapped to a Mare's-Leg". The "Mare's-Leg" being the odd sawed-off rifle McQueen lugged around on TV's "Wanted Dead or Alive". Few novels of any sort tackle profound questions with the adroitness of "Bucking the Tiger". Bruce Olds' way with the word is nothing short of miraculous. His command of history is nothing less than impressive. After this book, Doc Holliday will live on with the reader forever.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Literary Fireworks, November 18, 2001

By 

Jason Gregg - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bucking the Tiger: A Novel (Hardcover)

Mr. Olds goes for it, mixing present day idiom, old time-y western vernacular and a few words that are exotics. However the somteimes borderline stylings are used in an effective telling of an interesting tale. I do wonder how in describing Holliday's first kill, he selected "invaginating" to describe what the knife did to the victim. The victims guts can invaginate the blade, but not vice versa. Anyway, so what if Old's does seem to over work things a little at times, it's worth it for having a story that weaves together 19th century text book accounts of disease etiology with Doc's gambling rules and the rememberances of colorful characters.

Jason

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Poetic Symphony, August 22, 2001

By 

Cheryl Walker (Eau Claire, WI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bucking the Tiger: A Novel (Hardcover)

If not the best, certainly the most beautiful novel I've read so far this year, the most poetic and lyrical. Doc Holliday was a tubercular gambler and gunman who ran around with a whore and lived a bloody life on several levels, including in his lungs. That Bruce Olds could take such unpromising material and turn it into a work of art is an act of genius. I don't even like "Westerns"--a friend recommended this book to me--but this is no "Western." It is a poetic meditation on mortality and loss, love and sex, art and violence, and it sings and dances on every page. It's less a story, than a symphony of language, and it works to perfection.