Mostly About Stories

Harsh Reality? Love and Class in Theodor Fontane’s On Tangled Paths

On Tangled Paths (Irrungen Wirrungen) is the fourth novel of the German author Theodor Fontane that I have read, and the third on this blog after No Way Back and Effi Briest. It is a love story, but an incredibly prosaic one. Its focus is the relationship of Lene, the adopted daughter of a washerwoman, and Botho, a young aristocrat and officer. The relationship is doomed from the start – Botho cannot possibly marry her. The great question is whether the characters will accept that and let what they have become a pleasant memory, or whether they will try to hold onto the past and potentially destroy their own futures. As with his other novels, Fontane writes simply, carefully, and intelligently about the social problems of the late 19th century. An old man when he published the novel in 1888, he treats his subject with corresponding warmth and wisdom.

Setting the Scene in On Tangled Paths

We begin with a house. Fontane demands a little initial patience – each one of his stories begins with a slow camera shot, drawing ever closer to a front door. The house in question is the one where Frau Nimptsch and Lene, her adopted daughter, live. From the beginning there is a note of plaintive nostalgia – Fontane mentions that the house is no longer there. We take this to mean that it has been consumed by the urban sprawl that transformed Berlin in the closing decades of the 19^th century from a comparative backwater to a metropolis as great as any then in Europe. We are witnessing in this building something temporary as the relationships of the novel, but still we are asked to sit by, to watch, to find its beauty.

A painting showing a thriving Berlin scene — In the background of *On Tangled Paths* we have a sense of the churning development of the newly founded German Empire. Many of the locations featured in the novel had already been destroyed and replaced by new buildings to house the city’s ballooning population by the time Fontane published it. Painting by Adolph von Menzel

Alongside Frau Nimptsch is an old couple, the Dörrs. They grow a little produce that they sell at market. These four characters form the working class of the novel, an untraditional family of sorts. They bicker, they argue, but there is a tenderness and warmth here. We are introduced to Lene and her relationship through conversation between the two older women. Frau Dörr, whose husband married her in part because he considered her more attractive for once having had a relationship with someone from the higher classes, takes a somewhat cynical view of things – that one must remain detached. “When they start gettin’ ideas, that’s when things turn bad.” Love is not something that triumphs over all else, but one factor among many in determining what makes best sense.

Lene and her Love

Lene is perhaps my favourite heroine of Fontane’s. Though she is young, she evades many of the clichés authors, especially male authors, usually attach to their female creations. And indeed, perhaps that’s what I like about Fontane – for all his mundanity in style, his content is quietly revolutionary. I was genuinely surprised when I understood that On Tangled Paths was going to have such a focus on the lower classes. It was so natural, but at the same time unusual for a work of the 19^th century. Though Lene is in love with Botho, her aristocrat, she also is intelligent enough to know that their time is limited. At one moment she’s putting a strawberry in her mouth for him to eat; in another, she’s admitting she knows this cannot last.

“Believe me, having you here now, having this time with you, that’s my happiness. I don’t worry about what the future holds. One day I’ll find you’ve flown away…”

Maybe words like these are dishonest. Maybe Lene uses them to try to convince herself to let him go. But they still speak to a deep self-knowledge and reflection, a kind of strength of character.

We meet Lene already into the relationship with Botho. They met after a boating trip went wrong and Botho intervened to save her party. That is in Easter, and before the end of the Summer things are finished between them. Time is short, and they aim to spend it well. One day, they go alone on a trip to an inn out in the countryside for a few days of peace and quiet. The whole experience is fragile, but beautiful for that very fragility. “Neither of them said anything. They mused on their happiness and wondered how much longer it would last.”

Botho…

Botho is less interesting than Lene, but then again, I’ve met far more of his kind in literature than I’ve met of hers. Botho is the kind of person I’d dismiss as a fool, no doubt because I see myself in him. He is terribly weak-willed, completely prey to external circumstances – his reputation, his family, and money. He is, at least at first, unable to do either what is necessary and part with Lene, or else to do battle against necessity and find a way for them to be together forever. Anything that suggests commitment he shies away from.

But at the same time, he is interesting more for what he and his role says about class in the early German Empire. Fontane is, after all, writing a book that is keenly attuned to slight and not-so-slight social differences. From the moment we meet him we’re aware that he’s not like the others: “He was visibly on the merry side, having come straight from imbibing a May punch, the object of a wager at his club”. He has been at the club, a place inaccessible to the women both on account of their gender and their class. He is jolly, but there is a hint of mockery about his joviality. When he declares that every station in life has its dignity, even that of a washerwoman, it’s hard to tell whether he really means it, or indeed anything he says.

…And his World

Fontane shows us Botho among Lene’s people, and then among his own. The change is immediately apparent. No longer is he Botho, but “Baron Botho von Rienäcker”. He lives in an apartment, with servants, with art on the walls and a bird in a cage for entertainment – the little hobbies of a certain social stratum. When he meets his friends they adopt masks in the form of names taken from books – Lene can read, but she hasn’t the cultural knowledge that is second nature to Botho’s coterie. He dines out with them, and we have a sense of further insurmountable linguistic barriers. Metaphors are invariably hunting related, or else concern the military – they are all officers. Botho’s enjoyment of Lene is tolerated, but not any suggestion that he would take it further. He is allowed entertainment, but not to go against his duty. He is trapped, but not like her.

A painting showing a restaurant scene of the sort Lene wouldn't have access too with her income and class — Max Liebermann, *Restaurant Terrace in Nienstedten*, 1902. Nienstedten is in Hamburg, but I like the painting. Food and drink is a part of Fontane’s repertoire of social commentary in *On Tangled Paths.* The Dörrs grow their own food, while Botho simply orders it. When he dines with Lene he gets filling meals of fish, but with Käthe he is forced into eating sweets – one woman provides what is nutritious, the other what is only on fulfilling on the surface.

But we should not judge him too harshly. He cannot truly know her life, just as she cannot truly know his. Each station has its sufferings, and while one certainly has it worse, we can only compare what we know. For Lene, the relationship is her life. “Lord, it’s such a pleasure just to have something going on. It’s often so lonely out here.” Her simple words speak to a deeper gulf. He can always find another Lene, but she can never find another Botho. Once, she describes seeing him in town among his people, riding. She cannot approach – her position is one of a spectator, doomed never to interact with him in the public space. She does not have the systematic advantage that is his by birth.

Two Perfect Matches?

Suddenly the relationship ends. Botho’s expenses have consistently eclipsed his spending, and his mother puts her foot down in a letter. Botho breaks with Lene, marries his rich cousin, and time skips forward two and a half years. Käthe, his wife, is a disappointment. Lene’s desire to learn is beautifully shown in a scene where she inspects a painting whose inscription is in English. She can mouth the letters with passionate interest, but their meaning is inevitably hidden from her. Käthe just doesn’t care. She epitomizes everything that Botho dislikes about his class – she is frivolous, full of empty words and phrases, and childish. Part of this is yet again a language problem – Botho wants authenticity; instead, he gets “chic, tournure, savoir-faire” – all French and fashionable words. He compares Käthe’s soulless letters from her time at a resort town to Lene’s misspelt but heartfelt ones.

And yet in On Tangled Paths there is no going back.

Meanwhile, Lene suffers into a new life of her own. She and Frau Nimptsch move out of their old home. In their new lodgings a religious man, Gideon Franke, falls in love with her. It is not the best match in the world, but Franke is hardworking, industrious – a new and modern man, through and through. He brings to Lene’s life much-needed stability, saving her from what no doubt would otherwise have been frightening poverty. Given a woman’s lot in the era, we should probably be as grateful as she is.

Pessimism or Realism? – the Morals of On Tangled Paths

Botho eventually comes to terms with his situation. In this lies the pessimistic, or perhaps realistic, side of On Tangled Paths and Fontane in general – no rash actions come in to save the day. But then again, no rash actions come in to spoil it. He doesn’t try to meet her again; in fact, he burns their love letters to better forget her. Lene, whose parentage is unknown, doesn’t turn out to be of royal blood. She doesn’t turn out to be anybody but herself. Botho, for his part, decides to find the good in his wife. It is not a wholly successful endeavour, but these things take a lifetime, and for Fontane it is enough to show the beginning of the process.

A photo of Theodor Fontane, author of On Tangled Paths, in his later years — Theodor Fontane. He started writing fiction when he was 57, and his works reflect that. There is a wisdom in *On Tangled Paths* and elsewhere, which though at times can strike one as pessimistic, nonetheless comes from a lifetime’s experience.

One day a colleague from the military meets him, Rexin, and asks his advice. He wants to know what to do about his own mistress: he hopes to marry her, or else escape Berlin altogether. He longs for “honesty, love and freedom” and hopes Botho will back him up. But Botho does not. He says that it is better to stop now, before the memories get too strong. No middle path is acceptable in the world they live in, and in the end staying within society’s bounds will always be the thing to do. It’s a surprisingly conservative message. But then, perhaps it’s the right one. The social bonds are simply too tight for anything beyond them to be worthwhile. There is no great love against the odds here, but we must remember that there is no great tragedy here either.

Perhaps “A silly young wife” really “is better than none at all”, as Botho concludes.

Conclusion

On Tangled Paths celebrates a pragmatic approach to life. Lene and Botho may not elsewhere reach the heights of bliss that they had had together, but they also remain alive and happy (enough) when the novel draws to a close. In the 19^th century novel this is already a great achievement. The message that love does not, or oughtn’t, conquer all may strike us as pessimistic or overly conservative, but I find it hard to argue with here. Lene perhaps is perhaps right in her parting words to Botho: “If you’ve had a beautiful dream you should thank God for it and not complain when the dream ends and reality returns.” Better to have a beautiful dream than see life become a nightmare.

I have come to love Fontane. His novels are short, but they each display a great deal of variety in their subject matter, and they are all extremely well-written. However boring they may appear, they are all worthy of close and repeated reading. The only shame is that with On Tangled Paths I have now reached the end of Fontane’s novels easily available in English translation. There exist versions of both Jenny Treibel, and of The Stechlin, but they are hard to find. I may be forced, alas, to read him in the original again, as I did Effi. Luckily, Fontane’s worth it. Wish me luck!

Sex and Society in Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else

Fräulein Else is a surprising novella of sex and desire that retains its power to shock even now, almost a hundred years after it was published in 1924. Its Austrian-Jewish author, Arthur Schnitzler, was rather notorious in his day for his works’ frank depictions of sexuality, especially – in the case of Fräulein Else – of female sexuality. Taking us inside his characters’ heads, in a stream of consciousness style reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s in Ulysses, Schnitzler in Fräulein Else and elsewhere shows us what, under the respectable veneer of 19^th century literary realism, was lurking all along – real and violent passion.

A painting of a reclining woman. The cover of my edition of Fräulein Else. — William Edward Frost, “Life study of the female figure”, (c) Victoria & Albert Museum. *Fräulein Else* asks us, at least in part, to consider how far the socially conditioned idea of innocent and passive women is actually true by showing us what actually takes place within one such woman’s mind.

Fräulein Else is the story of a young girl whose life falls apart over the course of one evening. A playful and young nature comes against forces she is unable to withstand – forces of power, both masculine and monetary. Else’s story is that of an attempt to live against a world that is unwilling to let her do so, and the results are ultimately fatal.

Setting the Scene – the beginning of Fräulein Else

We are introduced in Fräulein Else to our protagonist in her natural state – at play. She has just finished a round of tennis with her cousin and his lover and she has decided to go back to her hotel. Else is in Italy, in the Trentino resort of San Martino di Castrozza. Whether the action takes place before or after the First World War is hard to make out – the hotel is full of international guests, just as in a Henry James novel – but we have a sense that for the likes of Else, the time doesn’t matter. She plays games, flirts endlessly in her head, imagines herself with many lovers, pictures a wonderful villa by the beach, and obsesses over her naked figure. All is well in the world.

But then a letter comes from home in Vienna. Her father, a lawyer, has fallen on hard times and there is no way for the family to keep itself afloat without Else’s help. Every friend has already lent him money, and there is now no choice but for Else to ask an acquaintance of her father’s at the hotel, Herr Dorsday, whether he would pay off the 30000 Guilder debt within the next two days. Otherwise the debtors’ prison awaits him. Else eventually asks Dorsday for her help, but he sets a condition – Else must show herself to him, naked, at midnight. After all her sexual imaginings, the idea repulses her, and she is sent spiralling into confusion. On the one hand, the demands of her father, of maintaining her social position; on the other, her desire for sexual autonomy.

One moment she seems to condemn her father to either shooting himself or being locked up; the next, she wants it to be herself who dies.

Else herself – a successful free spirit?

Coming from the 19^th century as I more or less do, Else’s clearly articulated sexuality is surprising, if not quite as shocking as it would once have been. Her pleasure in her young and naked body shows the pure desire to live that she embodies:

“Ah, how wonderful it is to walk naked up and down one’s room. Am I really as beautiful as the mirror makes me look? Ah, come a little closer, my young lady. I want to kiss your blood-red lips. I want to press your breasts to mine. What a shame it is, that glass, cold glass, separates the two of us. Oh how good we would be together. Isn’t it so? We need nobody else. Not a single other human being.”

But for all her sexual confidence, the text also reveals a kind of solipsism on Else’s part. Without any love for those in the world, she ultimately turns inward. She is free spirited, imagining herself with hundreds of lovers, but she has no respect for any of them. I liked her because of her wilfulness, not because she is in any way a good person. But this lack of love for others is also, it seems, the result of a lack of love from them too. After dismissing the French and piano lessons she concludes of her upbringing: “But what goes on in my heart and what digs at me and makes me afraid, has anyone ever cared about that?” We have a sense that, even disregarding the stream of consciousness, Else is not only unhappy, she is also terribly alone.

A Woman’s Lot

Thoughts of suicide circle around Else like flies. She has several capsules of Veronal, a popular sleeping pill, and even before the letter arrives she considers taking them all. For all her spiritedness, what stands out about Else is just how unhappy she is. In spite of her attempts to maintain autonomy in this world, it’s clear that she’s trapped in it. Even though she pretends that all is well at the novel’s beginning, the very fact that she has the pills on hand suggests that this is not exactly the case.

She is not talented. She admits as much. “I’m not made for a bourgeois life. I possess no talent”. She speaks several languages and plays the piano, but in the end, there’s nothing she can do with her life except waft about hotels. Her choice is either a sensible marriage, or a “nurse or telephone operator”. For a woman at the time, there were few other choices. When she tries to assert herself, her only option is to be a “Luden” – a slut, as opposed to the whore Dorsday wants her to be, or a passive wife. But even this assertion is imperilled by her dependence on Dorsday’s money. In the end, she can barely assert herself at all.

Else hatches an insane plan involving going to Dorsday, who is listening to music, naked but for a coat and shoes. She is successful, but the intensity of the moment leads to her fainting and being carried back to her room by her cousin and her aunt while they wait for a doctor. Here again we have a sense of Else’s powerlessness as a woman. Her problems and mental state are immediately dismissed as hysteria and – what is more – her aunt thinks the best course of action is simply to lock Else away in an institution. Even among women, the pressure to conform is paralysing, and the punishments for non-conformity are terrifying. Else, who has shown her sexuality in public via her nakedness, now must be hidden away.

Decline and Fall: Money and Society

But the greatest pressures on Else are financial. One key tension of Fräulein Else lies between one’s place in society, and where one ought to be. As Else remarks, she’s not fit for the bourgeois life. Alongside her own thoughts of suicide, she mentions that her father’s brother killed himself when he was young too. Her father is desperately, and failingly, trying to maintain his position in society through money that he doesn’t have. Else herself can only enjoy the hotel because of the good graces of her aunt, who is paying for her stay. Wherever she looks, she is dependent on others because she has no money for herself. Dorsday can control her because he has money, and because he is an older man. Even if Else were to go against him Dorsday can dismiss her as being hysterical. She is doubly trapped.

Stream of Consciousness, Loss of Consciousness

In fact, the very form and style of Fräulein Else plays into its suggestions about female sexuality and suffocating society. Else is free – to flirt, to imagine a beautiful future – but only within her own mind. Whenever she comes into contact with external forces, whether they be a telegram from Vienna or a chance encounter with friends, she is unable to control herself – social and familial obligations suddenly take over. At the novella’s end, when Else lies dying after a sudden faint, the situation is particularly acute. She is conscious – she hears what others are saying all around her – but she is unable to get up to act or speak for herself. In dying, she has become even more fully the object, open to the control of others, than she ever was before. The sense of being locked in is only the culmination of an entire novella’s worth of powerlessness.

Conclusion

I liked Fräulein Else. Else herself, with her divided nature and conflicting loyalties, is described well – I really felt she was alive, and though I knew what was coming it was awful to watch it happening through her eyes. I really had a sense of how much she wanted to live, and yet how hard it was for her to do so in the society she lived in. But all the same, and as much as I liked the stream of consciousness style, I felt a sense of relief when I finished the story. A feeling of claustrophobia from the style suits the plot, but it’s not something I would want to see extended into a novel-length project. Fräulein Else is good because it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Any longer and we might lose our patience with our young and foolish protagonist, or the tragedy might be blunted.

Fräulein Else is the first thing I’ve read by Schnitzler and will probably not be the last – if for no other reason than my edition also contains his “Lieutenant Gustl”, and because the German was surprisingly easy to read. For more Austro-Hungarian tales of declines and falls, Hofmannsthal, Márai, and Zweig are your “friends”.

Have I completely misread Else? Why not leave a comment below?

Did you find what you were looking for? John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing

This is the real deal: Butcher’s Crossing, a Western by the author of Stoner, is a truly awesome book. Because although it’s deadly serious, it’s also a Western through and through. Adventure, violence, and the great outdoors are all here in abundance and lovingly described. The only difference between Butcher’s Crossing and more traditional examples of the genre is that Williams, through respect for it and its worlds – he himself grew up in Texas – shows that behind its clichés there lurks an untapped dread, horror, and depth. Just as Conrad cut incisively into the myths of Western Imperialism in works like Heart of Darkness, here Williams does the same for legends of America’s westward expansion. But instead of resorting to the fantastic brutality of Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, Butcher’s Crossing works by being completely realistic. Its enemies are not superhuman judges but simple nature, harsh and incomprehensible.

The first edition cover of Butcher's Crossing, showing two crossed rifles and a buffalo. — The first edition cover of *Butcher’s Crossing*. In the story Western tropes are used to reveal the nihilism and terror lurking underneath our romantic view of the West. But the story itself is romantic, and that’s where its great power comes from.

A Hero and his Search

Our hero is William Andrews. A young man of twenty-three, he has done a few years at Harvard and had enough. Inspired by the lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Butcher’s Crossing takes place around 1872), Andrews sets out West, to find… something. “It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous”. But the word “perceived” already clues us into Andrew’s uncertainty. We have no reason to doubt the goodness of his intentions, but every reason to doubt his surety in what they are. At the beginning of the novel Andrews blunders into Butcher’s Crossing, a small town dependent on the trade in buffalo hides. He has a letter of recommendation for a man there, McDonald, who knew his father.

Andrews is not heroic. He is terribly naïve and idealistic. He mistakenly identifies a local prostitute as the friend of a man he’s meeting in the saloon, rejects an offer of work from McDonald (“I don’t want to be tied down”) and almost immediately gets involved with a huntsman, Miller. This man tells him a story about a mythical, heavenly valley in Colorado Territory filled with buffalo, and Andrews can’t resist offering to help finance an expedition there. He’s attracted by Miller, a man of action who knows the land, and who seems to understand what Andrews is after. “A body’s got to speak up for his self, once in a while”, he says. Three men join Andrews on the expedition: a religious one-armed drunkard, Charley Howe; a coldly independent German, Fred Schneider; and Miller himself. For Andrews, this is the most meaningful time of his life.

But perhaps that meaning’s not what we’re really after.

Adventure and Style in Butcher’s Crossing

What does the feeling of adventure mean, and how do stories give us it? Perhaps it is feeling of seeing something new when it is balanced by the sense that this new thing is real and valuable. When we look out of the car window and see nothing except repeating suburbia, or an endless forest, it can feel like it’s not an adventure because we don’t want to find value in the landscape, though for someone with a different set of experiences, this suburbia or woodland could be exactly the novel world they are looking for. A writer of talent can make the familiar new and the unvalued valuable, but there certainly needs to be a journey involved in an adventure too. We need to feel a sense of movement, of progression in landscape or in knowledge.

A painting showing a mountain, lake and forest — Albert Bierstadt – The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, used on the cover of the NYRB version of Butcher’s Crossing. The painting, like the novel, captures the beauty of the landscape.

The adventure of Butcher’s Crossing is a descent. I noticed that the characters of the book are almost always described as going downward in key moments. And this downward path is a moral one as well as a physical one. But long before the darkness creeps in, we are treated to a world of beauty. The world of Emerson’s “Nature” and picture books Andrews read when he was at home. And this beauty is described with a style that for me is incomparable. Williams is a master of the perfectly carved sentence, one neither too long nor too short. When you read him you have the feeling that he worked out every word and its position with the utmost care and long before he put pen to paper. An interview with his widow I read bears this out. But he is also meticulous – every action is described in detail.

“The rich buffalo grass, upon which their animals fattened even during the arduous journey, changed its colour throughout the day; in the morning, in the pinkish rays of the early sun, it was nearly gray; later, in the yellow light of the midmorning sun, it was a brilliant green; at noon it took on a bluish cast; in the afternoon, in the intensity of the sun, at a distance, the blades lost their individual character and through the green showed a distinct cast of yellow, so that when a light breeze whipped across, a living colour seemed to run through the grass, to disappear and reappear from moment to moment. In the evening after the sun had gone down, the grass took on a purplish hue as if it absorbed all the light from the sky and would not give it back.”

The Mountains: Buffalo Killing

A virgin land, the mountain valley, their goal – Miller’s suggestion that there is a secret paradise has a kind of mythic feel to it. Elsewhere, the buffalo numbers have already massively declined from overhunting. But the place is real, and soon the hunters reach it. “A quietness seemed to rise from the valley; it was the quietness, the stillness, the absolute calm of a land where no human foot had touched”. Andrews feels a sense of fulfilment as they approach the mountains, but as before this fulfilment is vague and nameless. Once more the narration refers to a “descent”. The hunters set up camp at the top of the valley, and then each day they head into it. Their aim is to slaughter and skin as many of the buffalo as they can.

A buffalo — However proud these beasts are when free to roam, dead and dying they have none of that grandeur to them. Death is emphatically deromanticised in *Butcher’s Crossing*, so that we see the hunters’ actions for what they really are – terrible, pointless, slaughter.

The killing is mechanised and pointless. Horror is something we need to imagine for ourselves, from sounds and images, like the sea of bones Miller talks about being left behind after the buffalo have been stripped and had time to decay. Williams’ characters don’t acknowledge it themselves. The buffalo they kill are strange creatures. It can happen that they go into what is called a “stand”, where they – deprived of a leader – refuse to move, even as they watch their brethren being slaughtered all around them.

“They just stand there and let him shoot them. They don’t even run.”

This happens in Butcher’s Crossing, again and again. Instead of showcasing nature’s nobility, we find nature’s stupidity, its incomprehension. The idealised joy of the hunt – of the chase, of the feeling of man vs beast – is relentlessly undermined by the way that the buffalo just let themselves die. And Miller is obsessive. He aims to clear the entire valley, killing thousands of buffalo even though they don’t have the space for all the skins on their wagon. His urge is frightening and destructive, but none of the other characters stand in his way. Instead, they watch and help. Andrews himself has a go with his own rifle, even as he admits to himself that “on the ground, unmoving, [the buffalo] no longer had that kind of wild dignity and power that he had imputed to it only a few minutes before”.

The Mountains: Nature and Identity

What meaning can be found in this slaughter? Is this what Andrews wanted, what he needed? Butcher’s Crossing is not a book to tell us what to believe. In fact, it is brutally anti-ideological, destroying truths rather than trying to build them. Andrews, because he is searching for a meaning, is susceptible to the meaninglessness around him. Instead of filling the absent centre in his heart, the slaughter hardens it. It says that there is nothing good here, and the world is simply amoral, empty of any kind of truth. In some way, his journey reminds me of that of William in the first season of Westworld. In both cases, the person that we find in the search to find ourselves isn’t who we wanted to be at all. But by that point it’s already too late to change.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a black and white photograph. Butcher's Crossing attacks many of his ideas. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. His essay “Nature”, with its benevolent view of the natural world, is subject to an implicit attack in Butcher’s Crossing. Here nature is anything but peaceful.

Nature cannot passively take beatings forever. At some point, arbitrarily, the tide turns on the hunters in their mountain paradise. Snow begins to fall. And what once was going to be the easiest hunt of them all quickly descends into hell. With snow, there is no way out of the valley, and the same battle for survival that the men prepared for the buffalo, now nature prepares for them. And the battle is worth waiting for, though I shan’t spoil its outcome here. The climax of the book’s second act is something to behold. It takes the Western genre and builds from them something every bit as horrific and beautiful as Blood Meridian. But here it is a thousand times more real – and for that, perhaps even more frightening.

Conclusion

I read Stoner a whole ago, but for me Butcher’s Crossing is the better book. Everything about it is awesome. The style is a model worth studying, of clean sentences and powerful images, but what really sets it apart is the story. Butcher’s Crossing is an adventure, taking those simple Western tropes that many have taken before, but unlike those predecessors Williams’ builds from them a work that is thematically dense and demands close attention. Andrews’ story of self-discovery and its dangers is one that has only become more relevant as time has passed and our culture has moved more and more towards self-creation, and the story’s fundamental lesson – that the person we find in extreme situations is not “real us” so much as only a possible version of “us” – is one that everyone can learn from.

But most of all, Butcher’s Crossing is a Western – exciting, adventurous, and fun. It’s a joy to read, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Have you read Butcher’s Crossing or anything else by Williams? What do you make of him? Leave a comment below!

Dec 2020 Update: I have now also put up a review of Augustus, Williams’ unbelievably awesome final completed novel. I think it’s even better than Butcher’s Crossing.