What do you think?
Rate this book
Strange Cowboy: Lincoln Dahl Turns Five
"Sam Michel is such a smart, manic, virtuosic stylist . . . the kind of deep insights that make you suddenly and newly appreciative of the world around you."—George Saunders
There was a hot, high sun, a hard ground and a long way off to any certain water, and my wife, a tenderfoot, I thought, not immodest, seemed bent on ruined feet and spectacle, on making of herself to passing innocents a living proof of what could happen to a man and woman ventured too far off alone together in the desert. Yet who passed? Who could be so innocent? Snakes and ravens, rabbits, buzzards, toads-- these passed, these witnessed, and what could they have made from us?...I saw myself preceded by my wife. I wanted to follow her, feel what she felt; I thought that I might find myself absolved… Maybe I would get some. Somewhere in me was a cheerful voice assuring me that what this needed was our getting laid.
Here is the head of his home—the one to speak, surely—on the occasion of his son Lincoln Dahl Jr.'s fifth birthday. Wife and mother order him to engage with his boy, but he remains in his chair dreaming up the speech he'll give to convey his life and glory to his boy, meanwhile avoiding his child and all others, until forced from his chair. Here's cowboy Beckett, a man of wonder and excess.
Sam Michel is the author of Under the Light and Big Dogs and Flyboys.
There was a hot, high sun, a hard ground and a long way off to any certain water, and my wife, a tenderfoot, I thought, not immodest, seemed bent on ruined feet and spectacle, on making of herself to passing innocents a living proof of what could happen to a man and woman ventured too far off alone together in the desert. Yet who passed? Who could be so innocent? Snakes and ravens, rabbits, buzzards, toads-- these passed, these witnessed, and what could they have made from us?...I saw myself preceded by my wife. I wanted to follow her, feel what she felt; I thought that I might find myself absolved… Maybe I would get some. Somewhere in me was a cheerful voice assuring me that what this needed was our getting laid.
Here is the head of his home—the one to speak, surely—on the occasion of his son Lincoln Dahl Jr.'s fifth birthday. Wife and mother order him to engage with his boy, but he remains in his chair dreaming up the speech he'll give to convey his life and glory to his boy, meanwhile avoiding his child and all others, until forced from his chair. Here's cowboy Beckett, a man of wonder and excess.
Sam Michel is the author of Under the Light and Big Dogs and Flyboys.
- GenresFiction
200 pages, Paperback
First published November 13, 2012
5 people are currently reading
129 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 16, 2015
Nevada, Christmastime. Lincoln Dalh sits transfixed in his favorite chair and muses over his life. The past creeps up on his present and seizes him into inaction. He stares at the strangers who claim to be his family with growing disbelief, trying to discern something of him in them, and failing. His sick mother, his clubfooted child, his distanced wife. How did he come to be father, son and husband? He doesn't recognize any of the persons he has become, he is swamped in a quicksand of unsummoned visions of previous selves. Time has eroded his wants, cheated his blind confidence in the rightness of things and placed him on this chair where his feathery digressions are helplessly swirled by the elastic currents of time.
His reverie is interrupted by Hope, the neighbor's dog and his son's best friend. The poor animal has been run over by a truck. Lincoln finds himself driving his pick-up with a stiff dead mongrel, his mute son Lincoln Jr. and the ghostly memories of his own childhood on a quest to reclaim his lost self.
There is not a single reflection in this galloping first-person narrative the reader won't identify with. The sense of displacement, the gradual alienation from an indoctrinated culture and the role we are expected to play in it. The paralyzing guilt that derives from neglecting the ones who truly matter in favor of a self-centered partiality that doesn't untangle the tight knot inside us. The incommensurable passage of time and the craving to recreate memory in order to rewrite the past. Lincoln’s fragmented thoughts emanate such unabashed honesty that they ring true. They are also dangerous because the act of excessive remembering entails the risk of forgetting oneself.
In a masterful display of zigzagging syntax, indiscriminate use of punctuation, and a surging magma of sensations, associations and imagistic repetition, Sam Michel features a circular timeline where all the action takes place in his protagonist’s mind. The reader is dragged away in a torrent of obsessive thinking, reshaping, reliving and imagining the person Lincoln once was, the person he failed to be and trying to reconcile both with the person that got lost in rumination. The inner monologue gains momentum in its fluidity, projecting the climax it anticipates by slowing down its delivery, which finally converges into the starting point of the narration.
Lincoln’s Proustian odyssey starts and ends in his chair, but his son’s approaching five-year old birthday and an improvised visit to the nursing home where his mother is slowly fading away, might provide the means to emerge from his inner delirium, might shake him off his lethargic detachment and reconnect him to his future.
Important words need to be spoken out loud, articulated, made tangible from abstract idea into reality.
Will those words keep Lincoln’s love from growing cold?
Will their recipients listen?
Will it be too late?
This Strange Cowboy might defy his Western heritage and act on his feelings or they might be blown away by his indecision, dissipated for good in the dusty winds of humanistic pathos, lost to the world, forever. It is for you, who read, and who yearn, to find out.
His reverie is interrupted by Hope, the neighbor's dog and his son's best friend. The poor animal has been run over by a truck. Lincoln finds himself driving his pick-up with a stiff dead mongrel, his mute son Lincoln Jr. and the ghostly memories of his own childhood on a quest to reclaim his lost self.
There is not a single reflection in this galloping first-person narrative the reader won't identify with. The sense of displacement, the gradual alienation from an indoctrinated culture and the role we are expected to play in it. The paralyzing guilt that derives from neglecting the ones who truly matter in favor of a self-centered partiality that doesn't untangle the tight knot inside us. The incommensurable passage of time and the craving to recreate memory in order to rewrite the past. Lincoln’s fragmented thoughts emanate such unabashed honesty that they ring true. They are also dangerous because the act of excessive remembering entails the risk of forgetting oneself.
In a masterful display of zigzagging syntax, indiscriminate use of punctuation, and a surging magma of sensations, associations and imagistic repetition, Sam Michel features a circular timeline where all the action takes place in his protagonist’s mind. The reader is dragged away in a torrent of obsessive thinking, reshaping, reliving and imagining the person Lincoln once was, the person he failed to be and trying to reconcile both with the person that got lost in rumination. The inner monologue gains momentum in its fluidity, projecting the climax it anticipates by slowing down its delivery, which finally converges into the starting point of the narration.
Lincoln’s Proustian odyssey starts and ends in his chair, but his son’s approaching five-year old birthday and an improvised visit to the nursing home where his mother is slowly fading away, might provide the means to emerge from his inner delirium, might shake him off his lethargic detachment and reconnect him to his future.
Important words need to be spoken out loud, articulated, made tangible from abstract idea into reality.
Will those words keep Lincoln’s love from growing cold?
Will their recipients listen?
Will it be too late?
This Strange Cowboy might defy his Western heritage and act on his feelings or they might be blown away by his indecision, dissipated for good in the dusty winds of humanistic pathos, lost to the world, forever. It is for you, who read, and who yearn, to find out.
August 9, 2016
It's work, remembering.What a brilliant novel by an erudite, unique prose stylist. Sam Michel's prose is truly the star here, weaving in and out of time, memory, dreams, fantasies, and regrets. With precision, Michel mixes extremely long clauses—at times reminiscent of Faulker—with short, terse sentences closer in timbre to Beckett and Hemingway. But Michel is a stylist all his own, moving from high registers to lower, dialect-driven segments, always dazzling and puzzling the reader, in control at every shift, turn, cliff edge, and shoreline.
Strange Cowboy takes place over the course of a day, but it spans a lifetime:
Here went a day, the hours passed, a distance crossed, a place I had returned to, yet I found myself no less confused, in sense, equally afraid, unchanged to myself, save for how I sounded to myself in speaking.The scope and breadth here are astounding, especially given how Michel's prose meanders, pulses, and poetically and rhythmically attends to the active memory life of the narrator, Lincoln Dahl, who has been asked by his wife to recall the birthday party given to him on turning five so that he can relate this tale to his own son, Lincoln, on his fifth birthday:
All this day, other days, for weeks I think before this day, months maybe, maybe years since I first saw this child and understood I was a father, I have been trying here to tell the boy this story, recount a day for him that was for me the first remembered and most enduring time through which I could sustain myself in the belief that all I saw was me and mine and all for me and could not be or ever once have been without me.What happens is that this request sends Lincoln into absorbing, lulling, manic, and yet at the same time lucid reflections on his relationships—with his mother, with his father, with his neighbors and a dog named Hope, with his wife, and, most importantly, with his son:
Uninvited scenes, some lived, some not, lines from dialogues, spoken and unspoken, images and phrases fastened onto things before me, as if whatever thing I told or thought to tell was free of me...The distance that we all feel in our relationships with those we love ("Perhaps it was this simple, to desire, people wanted"), the desire to speak and yet feeling paralyzed and rooted in patterns not conducive to communicating our truest emotions ("I despaired that there might never come a day my son and I would each be hearing from a clear desire if I should call him sweetheart"), the regrets that cause pangs when looking back at and assessing our lives and the impact we had on others—all of these are here, in soaring and dazzling sentences—some of which rely heavily on rhythm and others that rely on other devices like alliteration (e.g., "the follow I foresaw in seeking out a view upon a snowbound summit")—that make one wonder how long Michel worked at perfecting them or if his talent is such that he can write sentences like this one in his sleep:
I saw myself in him, my son and I as one, careening, riding level ground through wilde descents of seeing, and reseeing, my son and I revived, reenacted, able to act, acting, reenabled.
I grow lighter, rather, rise, emerge, an inertial heat appears to bear me up and outward, as the past succeeds itself, accelerates and passes in and out of me, colliding with itself, disintegrating as it comes and goes, resolving finally into unfamiliar fragments, unwedded to the words and names through which such sounds and flashes once covered and once enshrouded.Strange Cowboy is a book that everyone who has lived, loved, and lost should read. And, since that is all of us, I would urge you not to wait a moment longer: Michel is bound to receive well-deserved accolades for this novel in the coming weeks and months. Flat-out amazing.
January 9, 2013
Give us a narrator, name him Lincoln Dahl. Have him regale us with stories of his life. Which Lincoln Dahl? No, not the senior, for we know he is not among us, and his agrarian myths ring true. Not the youngest, for we know his story will be more reliable, even at the tender age of four on the eve of five. Give us THAT Lincoln Dahl, the one who understands the tale to be told must be precarious in its gossamer fragility. Its unreliability can collapse at the flutter of air from a passing sparrow, yet is required to support the weight of the world. That Lincoln Dahl.
"The past, as I recount it, grows as wide for me as any future; I proceed with no more certitude in recollection than I do in my predictions. Procession is procession." A Kafkaesque search for a dog pound. A bathroom scene that would make Nicholson Baker proud. A stylish telling of events that would make Nabakov believe an unwritten novel stolen from his dreams. "Strange Cowboy" contains all of these and is still wholly unique in its telling. You can take one of Sam Michel's sentences, frame it, and simply admire it for its individual achievement of beauty:
Each remembrance, she discovers, is a memory of a memory, and memory is the ward through which experience is leavened into weight.
Or you can take the accumulation of sentences, in all of their beautiful fragility (change one word, Lincoln, and that whole thing is coming down) and appreciate that the parts become the whole that makes this novel into a literary beast; an achievement that will only improve upon each re-reading.
"So much belief depends upon being believed," says Lincoln. But we don't believe you. Far more importantly, we believe IN you, Lincoln. Yes, we understand when you tell us that your body bears "wakeful testimony to the most outlandish fictions." We are with you. All the way. Now finish this tale, and then tell us another. Make it the story about how you burned down the barn on your fifth birthday.
"The past, as I recount it, grows as wide for me as any future; I proceed with no more certitude in recollection than I do in my predictions. Procession is procession." A Kafkaesque search for a dog pound. A bathroom scene that would make Nicholson Baker proud. A stylish telling of events that would make Nabakov believe an unwritten novel stolen from his dreams. "Strange Cowboy" contains all of these and is still wholly unique in its telling. You can take one of Sam Michel's sentences, frame it, and simply admire it for its individual achievement of beauty:
Each remembrance, she discovers, is a memory of a memory, and memory is the ward through which experience is leavened into weight.
Or you can take the accumulation of sentences, in all of their beautiful fragility (change one word, Lincoln, and that whole thing is coming down) and appreciate that the parts become the whole that makes this novel into a literary beast; an achievement that will only improve upon each re-reading.
"So much belief depends upon being believed," says Lincoln. But we don't believe you. Far more importantly, we believe IN you, Lincoln. Yes, we understand when you tell us that your body bears "wakeful testimony to the most outlandish fictions." We are with you. All the way. Now finish this tale, and then tell us another. Make it the story about how you burned down the barn on your fifth birthday.
February 19, 2013
A fine novella well deserving of five stars. Then it continued on past a little before the halfway mark. Until then we sit with a man in his chair, withdrawn from his life. He speaks to himself and thus to us, the rapt reader, caught in a haunting poetic prose, unequaled in its searching cadence-remembrances of how Coltrane circled towards the center through the spirit of his tenor sax-its spare reach toward a resolution just beyond grasp. His emotional estrangement from his wife, his young damaged son, the objects and the world around him-possibly from the indifference of a father and abuse from an intrusive mother which early culled and crumbled all borders-leave him in the safety of his chair. He seems resigned to a search he will never reach. The genius in this stunning beginning is the dissonance between the character and the prose style he recalls himself in. In lesser hands this could be a dull strategy, the simple bleak man with a rich inner life. We have all read it before. He is a simple man brought up on a ranch raising horses and cattle, helping in the birthing of newborns and performing outdoor chores. Now living on O street in a subdivision, when not in the chair reflecting on himself he is involved in the straight-planed tasks of home maintenance with its silent delayed rewards. Yet, it works. This is not the poetics of great poets or the prose of pristine stylists. It is the unique beauty of the isolate's thoughts. Despite being able to close your eyes and revel in the writing still it is sharp-edged, lost, hunting for what it is that needs to be hunted. The dissonance is further rendered in a believable way as he finds his beauty in the nearby desert. He raises its ethereal images from sand and dust, acrid hills and parched plants. It unfolds into an original garden of paradise. There is a scene where he solves how to be truly intimate with his wife as they lay together by describing his life growing up on the ranch and its daily natural beauties. If nothing else is read in this book don't miss this. This is the best that recent writing has to offer.
Then, a little before the halfway mark the story had been told. The race was already won yet Michel continued. From this point on he seemed in search of a story. A further story or another isn't for me to say but he was tired, winded and the language which had been such a crucial and beneficial part of the narrative flagged. Each paragraph I felt it seeping out and my wanting it back. The self-reflexive, self-refractive, self searching couldn't continue on without at some point stepping gradually over the line into flat-lined obsession. This was what happened for me where even the attempts to recapture the prior elevated prose became an irritant. Frustrated and angry I heeded GoodReads Friend M.and his belief that Michel is a short story writer by nature-I really want to buy his collection, it must be amazing-but in my thoughts possibly not a natural novelist. The waning second section may well be what he had to do to flesh it out into novel size. In the end I think it is a package in part filled with false space. However, some delicate cutting in the right spot would leave a gem.
So, five stars for the first part, one star for the second part. I've never been good at math but I calculate that as a three. However, as I said, and I believe as has been reviewed, writing shorter forms Michel must produce magic. I am looking forward to finding out.
Then, a little before the halfway mark the story had been told. The race was already won yet Michel continued. From this point on he seemed in search of a story. A further story or another isn't for me to say but he was tired, winded and the language which had been such a crucial and beneficial part of the narrative flagged. Each paragraph I felt it seeping out and my wanting it back. The self-reflexive, self-refractive, self searching couldn't continue on without at some point stepping gradually over the line into flat-lined obsession. This was what happened for me where even the attempts to recapture the prior elevated prose became an irritant. Frustrated and angry I heeded GoodReads Friend M.and his belief that Michel is a short story writer by nature-I really want to buy his collection, it must be amazing-but in my thoughts possibly not a natural novelist. The waning second section may well be what he had to do to flesh it out into novel size. In the end I think it is a package in part filled with false space. However, some delicate cutting in the right spot would leave a gem.
So, five stars for the first part, one star for the second part. I've never been good at math but I calculate that as a three. However, as I said, and I believe as has been reviewed, writing shorter forms Michel must produce magic. I am looking forward to finding out.
April 12, 2013
from NOÖ [14]:
Read this in the dark in my apartment, except I shouldn’t say dark because I could see the lights from the parking garage. But they weren’t lights like what falls down a Nevada canyon or seethes through creosote bush, which is light this novel knows a lot about. Also demanding mothers and mute sons and visionary wives. Remember Beckett? Then here you go: Beckett on the range, cowboy Beckett, dandy bolo tie Beckett, and some of the most beautiful desert river sentences and heart silt I have set upon in a good long while. If I could afford to buy all of my friends new boots, I would put a copy of this novel in each pair.
Read this in the dark in my apartment, except I shouldn’t say dark because I could see the lights from the parking garage. But they weren’t lights like what falls down a Nevada canyon or seethes through creosote bush, which is light this novel knows a lot about. Also demanding mothers and mute sons and visionary wives. Remember Beckett? Then here you go: Beckett on the range, cowboy Beckett, dandy bolo tie Beckett, and some of the most beautiful desert river sentences and heart silt I have set upon in a good long while. If I could afford to buy all of my friends new boots, I would put a copy of this novel in each pair.
October 13, 2014
Some fantastic prose here - beautifully crafted and, as a father of a three year old son, had much to say to me.
I suspect, had I read it at a less busy and stressful time for me it would have been a 5 star read, but, as it is, there were times in the back half my attention wandered, and my interest and pleasure waned. I had that frustrating feeling of words simply falling into a black pit in my brain, never to see the light of day again. Maybe I should just read some trash until my mind gets it shit together again...
I suspect, had I read it at a less busy and stressful time for me it would have been a 5 star read, but, as it is, there were times in the back half my attention wandered, and my interest and pleasure waned. I had that frustrating feeling of words simply falling into a black pit in my brain, never to see the light of day again. Maybe I should just read some trash until my mind gets it shit together again...
February 24, 2021
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/st...
"There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket."___Samuel Beckett
There has been mentioned, in some bit of negative light, that Sam Michel basically lost his prop and his steam during the second half of the book, that is after he had faced his objects honestly and had for some readers no more to say. I personally do not have any problem with Michel continually circling his object, supersaturating as the teacher Gordon Lish instructed us all for years to do. But when the sentences are constructed too perfectly, almost engineered too cleanly, too studio-like, then their brilliance is lost on a reader such as myself. I am of the school of dirt. I like my music dirty and somewhat raw. The homogenized sound is not one for me. It sounds hollow and barely alive. But I have remarked previously why I would read an entire novel by the likes of Sam Michel. He has some fantastic kernels to be found in these sentences, and it seems quite a worthwhile endeavor for us to take the time to sift them through.
...I bought her silken underpants. I lapped mousses from her cleavage. Apparently, I said I liked the flavor of her cunny-stew. I would growl—it seems to me implausibly—coming up from there, smeary lipped, and kiss her. (page 16)
In my introduction to the latest book of my poems just recently published, a segment titled No Entry found in the Ravenna Press edition Triple No. 2, and having in it twenty-nine gems of mine besides, I wrote how my son as a kindergartener wrote a Valentine to his mother stating, Dear Mom, i im Thanked bi you for having me.
I was struck as well by Sam Michel's own sentence in his book where he wrote,
...Thanks to me for having had him. (page 28)
There are few sections in the novel that really connect with me on a personal level though, but when they do it is not only a relief but a rush as when the father's voice is speaking. I thoroughly enjoyed that section and wished there were more. But a section reminiscing about what his mother had to say was also especially poignant for me.
...She said it never bothered her, my being lost to Easter bunnies and to Santa Claus, but her heart aged for me sorrowfully the day she saw me sitting on the fencerail with my legs crossed. Next thing she could see for me was a hand-rolled cigarette, a cafe in a European capitol, a sneer, a book, contempt for her and my father, a closet full of black. One day I would be too clever to discover anything at all I could believe in; I would lay my head against my horse's chest and not be moved to love him. (page 47)
I have no idea why Michel did not carry out this sentence further, the narrator's mother being quoted, and go on at some length about these literary memories for what would become of him. I was disappointed not to have read another word regarding these thoughts which would have bought me out completely.
...All of life is not enough. (page 72)
Similarities exist for me between a group of fiction writers who have studied under the tutelage of Gordon Lish. Sam Michel resembles often enough for me anyway the language-mastery of a Gary Lutz. At least he is the first writer that comes to my mind. Of course there are others such as Michel's partner Noy Holland, also Dawn Raffel, Sam Lypsite, and even Christine Schutt. What it is these writers do is quite hard to explain, but their mastery of the style makes them resemble a bit of each other. It is almost uncanny. I am not sure others feel the same way, but there is a familiarity here that tends to make me feel uncomfortable. Familiarity tends to lose its luster with me the same as over-developed or perfectly engineered music has a tendency to do to me.
...We match each other in successive phases of ungrowness, continue to be insufficiently contrasted... (page 80)
In particular, the above sentence could have also been written by another ex-Lish student. Gary Lutz the most culpable of all. Here is another one of the same stripe, and I mean no disrespect at all to Michel or any others I might mention here in making my point. I am not saying there is anything wrong at all with these sentences, I am saying particularly why they do not keep me engaged, and it is mostly because I have already seen them before.
...To a man of them, and to a woman, you would not catch them being young. (page 214)
It is not that I do not appreciate the work involved and the genius it takes to write these sentences, they just do not sustain me for long periods of time. Only the music that never becomes familiar to me even after countless re-listening excites me still. If it sounds like something I have heard before I generally move on and venture somewhere else.
...Set a chair up in his shower, drank until his cells were floated too far off from one another and it killed him. (page 215)
Another brilliant sentence but just more of the same structure and style I am lately here talking about. I confess for the last few months I have been reading much of Robert Walser. Though his work focuses on the little things he is constantly on the move, and it is all still fresh to me. Walser has said that his entire work was all just part of one long novel and I find no argument to give against his own assessment. But in totality it is a masterwork and one I seem not to be able to wear out or find at all redundant. Same goes for Thomas Bernhard who repeats himself often but never becomes a bore to me.
...Have you come to what you meant? (page 260)
It is very difficult to write sentences the way Michel and these others I have spoken of do. They are masterful, such as this next example.
...Then, too, poultry crossed her mind; my testicles seen lolling from my backside, inducing her to visions of the turkey's wattle, the scalded, wrinkled throatsack of the barnyard cock. (page 87)
I do read constantly, and on average I have going four or five books at a time. I also tend to write a good bit myself most days, so the extensive bombardment of all these other writers into my consciousness and is a given and not something I can be concerned with ever, really. A particular work either holds my attention and makes me want more, or it doesn't. As much as I wished and willed for myself otherwise, I had to force my way through my reading of this book even though I have the greatest respect for Sam Michel and his efforts on the page. The work involved in the construction of his sentences make him seem otherworldly or his sentences having been composed by a person somewhat different than most of us, which is a very good thing. There are precious grains that cannot be found anywhere but in his text, and for that you have to read it. And so I did.
...You haven't seen it all in folks until you've seen it all and when you have that isn't happy. (page 102)
There is enough evidence that Sam Michel has had his hands close to the earth he speaks of in this book. Anybody who uses the word Visqueen must have had some construction background, as even some laborers today wouldn't have a clue still for what he was saying in the following sentence regarding the neighbor's dead dog.
...Why not take her for a ride, I thought, wrap her in a sheet of Visqueen from the garden, stow her in the trunk and drive? (page 125)
But at least for me, even with all its good parts, the bulk of the book could have been written by a small number of writers I know who are just as gifted as Michel. In other words, the voice was not uniquely there for me. I think one reviewer is correct in saying that a good editor would have made all the difference. It would be my guess that Gordon Lish would have cut the living daylights out of this book if given the chance. The acknowledgement page in the back of the book lists several excellent writers who Michel thanks for having earlier read the book, among them Gordon Lish. The blurb by Lish found just inside the front cover offers up enough proof that the teacher certainly loves instead the first book he actually had a hand in as editor, Under the Light, a book of brilliant short stories that Lish champions again in his blurb as a form of justice instead of his blessing made on the one here that we've been given. This suggests at least to me that Lish wasn't used as the editor much at all, if any, for this book. I know how this is. It is very difficult to want to use the teacher's hand in a work that may not see the light of day if he, Lish, would have his say. In my own experience working with him, Lish says he loves my poetry and wishes for me to stay a poet and leave the writing of fiction to a guy like Cormac McCarthy, who in his mind nobody can beat. But a writer writes and we scribblers want to be published. And be acknowledged for our talents and our work. But sometimes it is better to hold our words, or have the courage it takes to allow the surgery needed and our sentences carved up by that tyrannically infamous knife.
"There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket."___Samuel Beckett
There has been mentioned, in some bit of negative light, that Sam Michel basically lost his prop and his steam during the second half of the book, that is after he had faced his objects honestly and had for some readers no more to say. I personally do not have any problem with Michel continually circling his object, supersaturating as the teacher Gordon Lish instructed us all for years to do. But when the sentences are constructed too perfectly, almost engineered too cleanly, too studio-like, then their brilliance is lost on a reader such as myself. I am of the school of dirt. I like my music dirty and somewhat raw. The homogenized sound is not one for me. It sounds hollow and barely alive. But I have remarked previously why I would read an entire novel by the likes of Sam Michel. He has some fantastic kernels to be found in these sentences, and it seems quite a worthwhile endeavor for us to take the time to sift them through.
...I bought her silken underpants. I lapped mousses from her cleavage. Apparently, I said I liked the flavor of her cunny-stew. I would growl—it seems to me implausibly—coming up from there, smeary lipped, and kiss her. (page 16)
In my introduction to the latest book of my poems just recently published, a segment titled No Entry found in the Ravenna Press edition Triple No. 2, and having in it twenty-nine gems of mine besides, I wrote how my son as a kindergartener wrote a Valentine to his mother stating, Dear Mom, i im Thanked bi you for having me.
I was struck as well by Sam Michel's own sentence in his book where he wrote,
...Thanks to me for having had him. (page 28)
There are few sections in the novel that really connect with me on a personal level though, but when they do it is not only a relief but a rush as when the father's voice is speaking. I thoroughly enjoyed that section and wished there were more. But a section reminiscing about what his mother had to say was also especially poignant for me.
...She said it never bothered her, my being lost to Easter bunnies and to Santa Claus, but her heart aged for me sorrowfully the day she saw me sitting on the fencerail with my legs crossed. Next thing she could see for me was a hand-rolled cigarette, a cafe in a European capitol, a sneer, a book, contempt for her and my father, a closet full of black. One day I would be too clever to discover anything at all I could believe in; I would lay my head against my horse's chest and not be moved to love him. (page 47)
I have no idea why Michel did not carry out this sentence further, the narrator's mother being quoted, and go on at some length about these literary memories for what would become of him. I was disappointed not to have read another word regarding these thoughts which would have bought me out completely.
...All of life is not enough. (page 72)
Similarities exist for me between a group of fiction writers who have studied under the tutelage of Gordon Lish. Sam Michel resembles often enough for me anyway the language-mastery of a Gary Lutz. At least he is the first writer that comes to my mind. Of course there are others such as Michel's partner Noy Holland, also Dawn Raffel, Sam Lypsite, and even Christine Schutt. What it is these writers do is quite hard to explain, but their mastery of the style makes them resemble a bit of each other. It is almost uncanny. I am not sure others feel the same way, but there is a familiarity here that tends to make me feel uncomfortable. Familiarity tends to lose its luster with me the same as over-developed or perfectly engineered music has a tendency to do to me.
...We match each other in successive phases of ungrowness, continue to be insufficiently contrasted... (page 80)
In particular, the above sentence could have also been written by another ex-Lish student. Gary Lutz the most culpable of all. Here is another one of the same stripe, and I mean no disrespect at all to Michel or any others I might mention here in making my point. I am not saying there is anything wrong at all with these sentences, I am saying particularly why they do not keep me engaged, and it is mostly because I have already seen them before.
...To a man of them, and to a woman, you would not catch them being young. (page 214)
It is not that I do not appreciate the work involved and the genius it takes to write these sentences, they just do not sustain me for long periods of time. Only the music that never becomes familiar to me even after countless re-listening excites me still. If it sounds like something I have heard before I generally move on and venture somewhere else.
...Set a chair up in his shower, drank until his cells were floated too far off from one another and it killed him. (page 215)
Another brilliant sentence but just more of the same structure and style I am lately here talking about. I confess for the last few months I have been reading much of Robert Walser. Though his work focuses on the little things he is constantly on the move, and it is all still fresh to me. Walser has said that his entire work was all just part of one long novel and I find no argument to give against his own assessment. But in totality it is a masterwork and one I seem not to be able to wear out or find at all redundant. Same goes for Thomas Bernhard who repeats himself often but never becomes a bore to me.
...Have you come to what you meant? (page 260)
It is very difficult to write sentences the way Michel and these others I have spoken of do. They are masterful, such as this next example.
...Then, too, poultry crossed her mind; my testicles seen lolling from my backside, inducing her to visions of the turkey's wattle, the scalded, wrinkled throatsack of the barnyard cock. (page 87)
I do read constantly, and on average I have going four or five books at a time. I also tend to write a good bit myself most days, so the extensive bombardment of all these other writers into my consciousness and is a given and not something I can be concerned with ever, really. A particular work either holds my attention and makes me want more, or it doesn't. As much as I wished and willed for myself otherwise, I had to force my way through my reading of this book even though I have the greatest respect for Sam Michel and his efforts on the page. The work involved in the construction of his sentences make him seem otherworldly or his sentences having been composed by a person somewhat different than most of us, which is a very good thing. There are precious grains that cannot be found anywhere but in his text, and for that you have to read it. And so I did.
...You haven't seen it all in folks until you've seen it all and when you have that isn't happy. (page 102)
There is enough evidence that Sam Michel has had his hands close to the earth he speaks of in this book. Anybody who uses the word Visqueen must have had some construction background, as even some laborers today wouldn't have a clue still for what he was saying in the following sentence regarding the neighbor's dead dog.
...Why not take her for a ride, I thought, wrap her in a sheet of Visqueen from the garden, stow her in the trunk and drive? (page 125)
But at least for me, even with all its good parts, the bulk of the book could have been written by a small number of writers I know who are just as gifted as Michel. In other words, the voice was not uniquely there for me. I think one reviewer is correct in saying that a good editor would have made all the difference. It would be my guess that Gordon Lish would have cut the living daylights out of this book if given the chance. The acknowledgement page in the back of the book lists several excellent writers who Michel thanks for having earlier read the book, among them Gordon Lish. The blurb by Lish found just inside the front cover offers up enough proof that the teacher certainly loves instead the first book he actually had a hand in as editor, Under the Light, a book of brilliant short stories that Lish champions again in his blurb as a form of justice instead of his blessing made on the one here that we've been given. This suggests at least to me that Lish wasn't used as the editor much at all, if any, for this book. I know how this is. It is very difficult to want to use the teacher's hand in a work that may not see the light of day if he, Lish, would have his say. In my own experience working with him, Lish says he loves my poetry and wishes for me to stay a poet and leave the writing of fiction to a guy like Cormac McCarthy, who in his mind nobody can beat. But a writer writes and we scribblers want to be published. And be acknowledged for our talents and our work. But sometimes it is better to hold our words, or have the courage it takes to allow the surgery needed and our sentences carved up by that tyrannically infamous knife.
October 24, 2014
I read a lot. I read 150 books a year on average. I read because I'm looking for something. I'm looking for a story I haven't already read 150 times. I'm looking for a story populated by actual humans, not with acceptable cut-out facsimiles. Most of all I am looking for voice. It's the rarest tool a writer can carry, even in literary fiction, which is the majority of what I read. This book delivered on every score. I hope Sam Michel is writing as fast as he can, because I am reading as fast as I can, and I slog through a lot of generic books to find one like this. If you are searching for a writer who stands out against the background, try this book.
February 1, 2013
Within a few sentences it becomes very clear that Sam Michel is one of the more talented prose writers currently working in America.
January 24, 2024
14 days to read 261 pages because i was fluctuating between bored and annoyed.
Read
June 11, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2013/01/14/r...
Review by David Winters
Unpublished until now, Strange Cowboy was the first novel ever written by Sam Michel, author of 2007’s Big Dogs and Flyboys and, over twenty years ago, the seminal short story collection Under the Light. Michel is married to another innovative author, Noy Holland, and like her, he was taught and initially edited by Gordon Lish. As with many students of Lish, the influence of Michel’s mentor looms large over his prose: every sentence in Strange Cowboy seems to summon up a new world, tied inside a taut knot of surging, swerving syntax. But beneath Lish’s stylistic stamp on this book, one can also discern other voices, more European in origin: Proust’s temporal consciousness; the humanist pathos of Joyce; certainly the obsessive discursiveness of Beckett and Bernhard. And Strange Cowboy’s story transposes all this into what could be called the true topos of modernism — after all, artistic truths are allowed to be counterintuitive — the American West.
In Winnemucca, Nevada, we meet Lincoln Dahl, a faltering first-time father. Like Beckett’s Murphy, Dahl sits philosophising in his favourite chair, transfixed yet transcendent, “unweighted, ecstatic.” But his introspection has left him in flight from life, or at least from his wife, his mother, and especially his son. To them he is merely “mothy, paunched, an ineffectual reminiscer.” Dahl’s son shares his name, as did his dead father, so Dahl is “the middlemost Lincoln,” the last male link in the chain of memories that makes his family a family. As such he is duty-bound to become a “model” for Lincoln Jr. His son is a “wheezy, stump-tongued, club-footed creature,” nonetheless not unwanted so much as unknown — the child of a parent nonplussed by children. “Deep, deep inside of you,” declares Dahl’s wife, “way down in your subbest-conscience, I believe you love him.” But love can’t be brought to life if it is buried too deep to disclose. For this reason, little Lincoln’s early years have been swept up in “a woozy spiral of neglect and woundings.” Today he turns five, and amid preparations for his party, his mother presses her put-upon husband to tell the story of his own fifth birthday; to relate the reconciling wisdom that “my name, too, was Lincoln . . . that I, too, was coming up on five once.”
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2013/01/14/r...
Review by David Winters
Unpublished until now, Strange Cowboy was the first novel ever written by Sam Michel, author of 2007’s Big Dogs and Flyboys and, over twenty years ago, the seminal short story collection Under the Light. Michel is married to another innovative author, Noy Holland, and like her, he was taught and initially edited by Gordon Lish. As with many students of Lish, the influence of Michel’s mentor looms large over his prose: every sentence in Strange Cowboy seems to summon up a new world, tied inside a taut knot of surging, swerving syntax. But beneath Lish’s stylistic stamp on this book, one can also discern other voices, more European in origin: Proust’s temporal consciousness; the humanist pathos of Joyce; certainly the obsessive discursiveness of Beckett and Bernhard. And Strange Cowboy’s story transposes all this into what could be called the true topos of modernism — after all, artistic truths are allowed to be counterintuitive — the American West.
In Winnemucca, Nevada, we meet Lincoln Dahl, a faltering first-time father. Like Beckett’s Murphy, Dahl sits philosophising in his favourite chair, transfixed yet transcendent, “unweighted, ecstatic.” But his introspection has left him in flight from life, or at least from his wife, his mother, and especially his son. To them he is merely “mothy, paunched, an ineffectual reminiscer.” Dahl’s son shares his name, as did his dead father, so Dahl is “the middlemost Lincoln,” the last male link in the chain of memories that makes his family a family. As such he is duty-bound to become a “model” for Lincoln Jr. His son is a “wheezy, stump-tongued, club-footed creature,” nonetheless not unwanted so much as unknown — the child of a parent nonplussed by children. “Deep, deep inside of you,” declares Dahl’s wife, “way down in your subbest-conscience, I believe you love him.” But love can’t be brought to life if it is buried too deep to disclose. For this reason, little Lincoln’s early years have been swept up in “a woozy spiral of neglect and woundings.” Today he turns five, and amid preparations for his party, his mother presses her put-upon husband to tell the story of his own fifth birthday; to relate the reconciling wisdom that “my name, too, was Lincoln . . . that I, too, was coming up on five once.”
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2013/01/14/r...
August 5, 2013
Had Samuel Beckett engendered a bastard child with Cornac McCarthy rather than drive Andre the Giant to school (or maybe during?), this here would be the product.
May 4, 2015
I struggled with the incredibly dense (yet beautiful) prose but when it clicked it was brilliantly insightful. Definitely one to read again someday.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews