Five top Neo-Westerns

Kent Wascom was born in New Orleans and raised in Pensacola, Florida. His first novel, The Blood of Heaven, was named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and NPR. It was a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Award for First Fiction. Wascom was awarded the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for Fiction and selected as one of Gambit‘s 40 Under 40. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he directs the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University.

Wascom's new novel is The Great State of West Florida.

At Lit Hub he tagged five favorite Neo-Westerns, including:

Anna Burns, Little Constructions

“There are no differences between men and women. No differences. Except one. Men want to know what sort of gun it is. Women just want the gun.” So opens the funniest book I’ve read this side of Charles Portis’ Norwood or the stories of Helen DeWitt.

But Anna Burns’ second novel is also one of the nastiest, most upsetting revenge stories in contemporary fiction. And with its archetypal figures, themselves influenced by the depictions of the violent American West, and an iconoclastic spirit, this is a Neo-Western to me, even if it’s set in Ireland.

The Western revenge story, by rights, tends to build to a showdown, and from the moment Jetty Doe, scion of a criminal family, bursts into a local gunshop and carries off an AK-74, Little Constructions goes from one showdown to the next at furious speed, borne along by some of my favorite sentences anywhere. There are showdowns not only with the brutal men who’ve warped generations of a Northern Irish family, but with the past of the entire country and the nature of male violence.

More than anything, or at least most exciting to me, this book is a showdown with the English language itself. Burns builds rhythmic and rhetorical structures that sometimes puzzle before they explode into dazzling perfection. Character names repeat and refract until we have Does such as Johnjoe and JanineJoshuatine bouncing off the page.

I could see the latter move striking some readers as cute or ridiculous, but as a member of a formerly criminal family (though no way near as lousy as the Does) with six siblings all of whose first names start with the same letter, my credulity remained unstrained.

I love Milkman, which won Anna Burns the acclaim she so rightfully deserves, but I adore Little Constructions. It’s hilarious, frequently horrifying, and utterly humiliates the very macho gun culture that the Western often embraces.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue