Customer Reviews

Bucking the Tiger: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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

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.

..."Tiger" is not, nor was it intended to be, a "Western," not in any conventional sense of that word. Anyone who (fairly) reads the book will recognize that at once. This is something else--literature (capital "L"), and it is wildly successful. Gorgeously written, deeply felt, brilliantly executed, it excavates the tormented soul of a man who until now has been the public property of myth and legend. The novel imagines an entire, abundantly rich interior life for Doc Holliday, all the long-buried stuff the movies have never dared address because there really is no effective way to film such psychological/emotional states. Not that there isn't plenty of sex and violence along the way, but all that is handled--there is no other word for it--lyrically. ... Oh, and the poetry it contains is ... quite astonishingly beautiful.

This is, to put it bluntly, one of the best novels I've ever read. Olds' prose is hypnotic and lyrical, and he somehow manages to give us a compellingly real Doc Holliday who is also strikingly mythical. The book's account of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral is stunning, like nothing you've read (or seen) before. This is a novel that will live for a long time.

This is one of the most fascinating, beautifully writtten "Westerns" I have ever read. In fact, I'd have to say it is one of the best BOOKS I have ever read. Period. If you know a lot about Doc Holliday, the subject matter alone will interest you. If you know very little, like myself, you will enjoy it not only for what you will learn about history of this character, you will bask in the language, which often reads more like poetry than prose. You don't have to be a Wild West fan to appreciate this novel, you only have to be a lover of serious literature. With this book, Bruce Olds has created a fictional character, rooted in history and based upon fact, that will endure for a long time to come.

Prepare for a tale unlike any other about the life and times of John "Doc" Holliday. At first, the reader may be surprised at the prose Bruce Olds eloquently displays on the pages of Tiger. One becomes entwined in Doc's grand life and death struggle. The words flow beautifully and a tale spun of laughter, love, hatred, melancholy, murder and lust engage the reader. Unlike the formatted Western story, Bruce Olds displays a unique courage and often admits: readers will either hate it or love it. Tiger is like a poetic dance; one must first learn the steps and once that is accomplished, one is fulfilled. An excellent book and Old West Chronicle recommends this book fully, John Savoie, Editor-in-Chief.

Readers who demand a simple, chronologically linear narrative, please apply elsewhere. "Bucking the Tiger" is a fever dream of a novel, kaleidoscopic in its fragmented vision and very nearly hallucinatory in its voices. There is nothing straightforward about this book, an ambitious labyrinth largely made up of first person observations from Doc himself and Big Nose Kate and Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and Dodge City [women] and TV cowboy show heroes. Even Thomas Berger's Jack Crabb makes a walk-on appearance under another name. The Doc Holliday within its pages is something of a Gilgamesh in ancestry, one third man and two thirds cinematic image. In the Gunfight (almost) at the OK Corral segment - hands down, the best recreation of that event I have ever read - picture Val Kilmer in the starring role. And from that starting point, Olds delves deep into the mind of Holliday. When you pick up this book, prepare to be dazzled by pyrotechnics and perhaps occasionally daunted by its determinedly literary demeanor. Just don't expect Louis Lamour.

I had a prof in grad school who asked if James's Ambassadors (or any of his novels in his "late style") as well as Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom were really worth the effort required to read them. He didn't think so. I thought he was a moron then and, after rereading Absalom recently, I think he's an even bigger moron now.

The same question could be asked about Bucking the Tiger and, though I partly enjoyed it, I'm not so sure I can answer yes. If The Ambassadors and Absalom are demanding (though in no way TOO demanding), it's nevertheless impossible to imagine them being anywhere near the same novels in altered forms: their "meanings" arise from the total experience of reading, of making one's way through them. Not so with Bucking the Tiger, which is a much more static and allusive novel than either of the two classics I've mentioned. At virtually every point in Bucking we are hit with an abundance of associations, allusions, echoes, riffs. In this sense it is more poetic than novelistic: its meanings appearing rather than accruing, I'm tempted to say, synchronically rather than diachronically, metaphorically rather than metonymically.

And this is fine, and even enjoyable: this is the author's method and it makes perfect sense considering the novel's stance toward history and how we know it. But the problem I have with it is that these set pieces, these extended riffs on poker, for example, which are often blatantly metaphorical, simply don't strike me as being all that interesting. As long as I focused solely on the play of language it was all fine, but when I could no longer resist the insistence of its obvious "meaning" I was disappointed. All of the verbiage often simply added up to triteness, to almost self-helpy notions of chaos, mortality, writing etc. And there was no forward movement of plot to complicate these banalities.

Lurking beneath the poet in this novel is a somewhat pedantic essayist who too often gets the upper hand. I looked forward to the fractured form of the novel, to the linguistic abundance, but was rather disappointed that it didn't ultimately add up to something more besides announcing at every static moment its own importance--like some amped up professor in a cul de sac telling us what we already know. There is much less play in this novel than I would've supposed: we the readers are left with as little air as poor consumptive Doc, the author heavy upon us as Death.

Bruce Olds' postmodern fictional treatment of the life of Doc Holliday begins with some fine moments. Describing brilliantly a poker game in which the legendary gambler stabs a cheating card player through the hand, Olds treats us to the drawled lines, "My dear sir, if the queen of hearts, as you but a moment ago thought to fob it sight unseen from your vest, is not just there impaled beneath your hand, as I know it upon memory of my sainted mother, I fear I do owe you an apology." However, as Olds continues to attempt to flesh out the life, and primarily the psyche and verbiage, of a man about whom relatively little is really known, the characterization, in spite of the relative complexity of Olds' narrative form, soon dissolves into the simplistic pattern of a distasteful (and oddly voluble, in this case) sociopath with whom many readers of Doc Holliday literature are only too fatigued with familiarity. Olds is able to bring some depth to the suffering tubercular gambler for a while, and the fragmented stream-of-consciousness style of the novel lends itself well to the purpose. Bits of poetry with flashes of occasional genius are interwoven into a vivid narrative of daily pain and endurance that promises much but ends up delivering little except Doc's further-tortured remains.

Portions of the novel adeptly re-phrase some of the most famous statements about Doc by people who knew him, including those who clearly misunderstood him. For instance, Olds gives us a Bat Masterson who just doesn't get it, something many of us suspected about him all along. There are even a few touching moments, which do justice to Doc's memory, like these lines from Wyatt Earp: "...for what it may be worth, I miss him, every day." And fair enough is Olds' insistence on regaling us with the phlegmy and bloody details of living, and dying, with tuberculosis. The pain Doc endured has seldom gotten the sort of attention it deserves, nor has its complex impact on his mental state.

For a while, Olds develops Doc's personality with skill. For instance, his withdrawal from life and relationships with other people is described aptly as "not so much a retreat as a secession." However, when Olds attempts to supplement this insight with Doc's detailed philosophy, the reader is served up leftovers hidden beneath a sauce of postmodern writerly posturing. This Doc, like bad movie villains and serial killers before him, shoots cats for the hell of it and refuses to shake hands with anyone. This last detail may actually be lifted from the movie Tombstone, in which Val Kilmer's Doc refuses to shake hands, specifically, with a crooked lawman. There are other details from the film Tombstone that Olds also extracts and runs with, including: the imperial facial hair arrangement, the wink at the OK Corral (Val Kilmer's idea, apparently) and the line "I'm your huckleberry," among others. Strangely, with all of Olds' pastiche-preoccupied authorial talent, Tombstone actually does a better job of portraying Doc as a human being in the end.

And this wouldn't even be so bad, if all Olds were interested in were half-satiric verbal pyrotechnics, but there are plenty of places where he seems to be genuinely interested in characterization but merely unable to follow through. It is, for example, predictably clever to have the bacterim-ridden gambler be an obsessive-compulsive personality type. Olds somehow seems to lose literary steam or perhaps simply to tire of his subject about half-way through. However, part of the failure of the novel for those who are interested in Doc Holliday is Olds' tendency to fill in historical blanks with occasionally faulty or questionable information. Olds has his Doc doing things he almost certainly never did. But beyond that, this Doc is not the reserved and even somewhat laconic Southerner that Doc's few actual quotes reveal, but a man enthralled with his own voice, who, by mid-text, drones on with pompously annoying alliteration aplenty. Doc was a refined Southerner, yes, but he often used brief, informal, to-the-point phrases like "Wyatt turned loose with a shotgun and killed Curly Bill." Olds' Doc, on the other hand, brings to bear any and all thesaural possibilities, not only during his meandering fictional reveries but also during well-documented dialogue. Adding lines to the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, Olds seems breathless with his ability to put words in Doc's mouth. All Doc said during the 30 second fight was: "Blaze away. You're a daisy if you have." But Olds seems to feel it not nearly enough, and instead has him prattle on to Frank McLaury with what seems, in spite of its relative brevity, prissily smug interminability.

Perhaps even more difficult to understand is his insistence on having the well-bred Hungarian prostitute, Kate Elder, speak with a strangely backwoods patois, using the word "warn't" and having little in common with Doc except their mutual enjoyment of down-and-dirty sex. Reducing Kate to little more than a simple frontier whore is almost as devastating to the narrative as reducing Doc to a cartoon southern gentleman who clicks his heels and bows to the Earps before proceeding to his speechifying appearance at the Tombstone gunfight. But where Olds really lost this reader was the way in which he chose to answer a common question savored by Doc afficionados: "What was Doc whistling as he arrived at the OK Corral?" Olds' ridiculously eye-roll-worthy and clichéd answer is hardly redeemed by the postmodern pretensions of his text. He was whistling-- Dixie.