Bucking the Tiger: A Novel - Hardcover

Olds, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374117276 ISBN 13: 9780374117276

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Bruce Olds is the author of one previous novel, Raising Holy Hell, which was named Novel of the Year in 1995 by the Notable Books Council of the American Library Association. He lives in New Jersey.

Reviews

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.

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.

So many books and movies have featured Doc Holiday that there's little need for another unless the author takes a startlingly new approach. Olds attempts this with a shotgun assemblage of poems, quotations, fictional renderings, and "reportage." Kate Haroney, often depicted as shrewish and low, comes alive through Doc's eyes as a spirited frontierswoman whom he deeply loves. Doc himself is a southern gentleman, drawling and droll, a scholar. He is afflicted with consumption, the implications of which Olds discusses in detail. The diagnosis that he had six months to live--which Doc stretched to 15 years--defined him. Doc is gloomy, alcoholic, and violent. He is also brilliant as he contemplates what it means to be a walking dead man--to buck the tiger. Olds' technique is unsettling and results in a book hard to classify: a combined western, biography, and loose anthology of meditations on death. But as he did with John Brown in Raising Holy Hell (1995), Olds manages to pluck a real man out of the distortions of time and Hollywood myth. John Mort
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374117276
• ISBN 13: 9780374117276
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256