Ok: The Corral The Earps And Doc Holliday A Novel [Hardcover]

Paul West (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2000

A novel about Doc Holliday and the notorious Earps that recreates in detail the famous shoot-out at the OK Corral and turns about long-cherished assumptions about who these men really were.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

West (The Tent of Orange Mist; My Mother's Music), a prolific writer and adventurous stylist, squeezes Doc Holliday dry in a meticulously researched but overworked historical novel. The basic story is familiar. On his way from Georgia to the healthier climate of Colorado, consumptive dentist Dr. John Henry Holliday visits Dallas, East Las Vegas and Dodge, gradually abandoning dentistry as he discovers his prowess as a gunfighter and his Keatsian obsession with death. Along the way, he saves the life of Wyatt Earp, marshal and gunman. The two become fast friends and eventually land in Tombstone, Ariz., where they take part in the almost mythical 1881 gunfight between the Clanton Gang and the Earp family at the O.K. Corral. In the confusion following the shoot-out, which West describes in a perfunctory shorthand, Doc abandons Earp and spends his dying days in Colorado, a melancholic figure both feared and respected as a gunslinger. Favoring character over action, and Doc's character over anybody else's, West's depictions of Doc's sometime lover Big Nose Kate, the Clanton Gang, Wyatt Earp and even the vast western landscape are threadbare foils erected to highlight Doc's already magnified traits. In lengthy, cantilevered sentences, the writer reveals Doc's thoughts on cigar smoking or the use of "if" in conditional sentences, often in the form of letters to Doc's cousin Mattie, a cerebral cloistered nun who gropes toward her spiritual enlightenment just as Doc gropes toward his in the desert, using violence and his worsening health as vehicles of redemption. West's acrobatic proseAladen here with Latin clich?s, such phrases as "the ogive windows of identity," and puns ("doxology/Doc's Ology")Ais more hindrance than help, and, in this strained tale, only Doc emerges as anything more than a cipher.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

As if to emphasize further his daring range, West is publishing two historical novels and a nonfiction work (The Secret Life of Words) this spring. West, whose 18 previous novels include the superb Rat Man of Paris and admired works about Lord Byron and Jack the Ripper, now takes on two more icons: Adolf Hitler and Doc Holliday. The Dry Danube is subtitled A Hitler Forgery, and West's school of fiction has its similarities to the art of a master forger. This novella takes place just before the Great War and is told in the voice of the failed Austrian painter Hitler. Its inspired narrative is stylishly solipsistic, like the paragraphless monolog novels of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (whose influence West acknowledges in an afterword). The narrator talks obsessively and bitterly about his two artist heroes, Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, who stubbornly refuse to recognize his brilliance and cooperate as mentors. The awful knowledge of what is to come later for Hitler (and for Europe) keeps the meandering narration from losing its tension. In a surprisingly enjoyable short work, West has found a voice that speaks with fluent authority to magnify a rarely examined historical moment before the Third Reich terrors. If impersonating the young Hitler was ambitious enough, taking on the famous dentist and consumptive gunslinger Doc Holliday (and his friends the Earps) may have been too far to stretch. O.K. is mostly written in a high-flown, third-person style that verges for long stretches on being a creative essay on Holliday and company. For a novelist, the mythology of the Old West is both attractive and dangerous: sources remain so unreliable on gunfighter history that it's difficult to acquire enough knowledge of someone like Holliday to build him an interior life or find a believable voice. Instead, West stays at a distance and, to create Doc's state of mind, shuffles his thoughts among the few things that are known definitively--that he coughed up blood a lot, hailed from Georgia, shot men expertly, played faro, and kept company with a widely admired prostitute named Big Nose Kate. If Doc remains fuzzy, Wyatt Earp is vaguer still. The Earps and Holliday who fought the Clanton gang in Thomas Berger's The Return of Little Big Man (LJ 2/15/99) may have been inventions, but they were vividly human characters. O.K., while containing lyrical passages of West's astonishing prose, is largely a missed opportunity to raise Doc and friends to the author's usual level of literature. Earpists will learn little that is new about the famous showdown. For larger fiction collections.
-Nathan Ward, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (April 10, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684848651
• ISBN-13: 978-0684848655
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,574,942 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars O.K., So What?, February 5, 2001

By 

C. Baker "cbaker" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ok: The Corral The Earps And Doc Holliday A Novel (Hardcover)

I saw a very positive review of this novel and being an avid reader of books about the West, and Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp in particular, I had to pick it up. I was sorely disappointed. So what if the author is considered a great writer and novelist -- the book is neither insightful nor realistic. Worse it is simply really, really boring.

The "novel" takes us through the adult life of Doc Holliday, mostly from his point of view, and attempts to dig very deeply into his psyche. For the life of me I cannot figure out why West wrote the novel in the third person. Given the deepness and detail he tries to convey about the introspective thinking of Holliday, it would have worked better written in the first person. Writing it in the third person made the style and substance seem distant.

Second, the novel just does not feel realistic. It's hard to believe anyone thinks so constantly upon their life in such an abstract fashion. And the conjectures about Holiday's personality don't feel right either -- based on what I've read of his life. Sure, West can conjecture whatever he wants about someone's inner self, but this just didn't "fit" Doc in my opinion.

After begrudgingly finishing the novel, the question I had of the whole exercise was so what?

I knew what I was getting into when I bought the book because I had read a prior review. I feel sorry for those who bought the book on impulse looking for a Western and the story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Those who did so I'm sure were even more disappointed than I.

I just cannot recommend this novel.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Paul West -- Not OK, March 15, 2003

By 

Frank (Sierra Vista, Arizona United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ok: The Corral The Earps And Doc Holliday A Novel (Hardcover)

According to the fly-leaf, the Chicago Tribune considers Mr. West "possibly our finest living stylist in English." Well, that may be but buddy he was way out of his genre with this book. The only reason I struggled through the entire book is that I finish what I start. Verbose, convuluted, complex and dry are some of the words I can muster up to describe this book. Reading one of the Greek tragedies that West continually refered to would be easier than getting through this horrid work of historical fiction.

West is a second-rate Faukner. At least Faukner lived in Mississippi. I got money that says West has never even BEEN to Arizona. I will say that this book had a LOT in common with Doc Holliday. Reading it was about as much fun as going to a dentist -- and did you about as much good as a dentist with a consumptive cough and a shaky hand.

Bottom Line: Don't waste your time.

1.0 out of 5 stars okthe corral!the earps and doc holliday a novel, June 19, 2011

By 

Rev ron - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Ok: The Corral The Earps And Doc Holliday A Novel (Paperback)

This novel is the most boring one I have read on Doc Holliday. Not sure where the author is going with it.