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Old Custer
Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't?
- GenresFiction
hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
9 people are currently reading
101 people want to read
About the author
Eli Cash
2 books14 followersEli Cash is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Brooks College.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
August 30, 2014
Outlandish polemic by celebrated bon vivant Eli Cash restlessly argues that George Custer not only survived the Battle of Little Bighorn, but went on to become a naturalist, as well as godfather, as it were, of the national park system. Cash wields historical data seemingly conjured out of thin air to suggest that, among other things, Custer helped save the Albert squirrel from extinction.
Heralded as heir to Cormac McCarthy and Jay McInerney, Cash's struggles with mescaline doomed his grandiose literary ambitions, his implosion culminating in the crash of his '64 Austin Healy 3000 into the residence of Royal Tenenbaum, Esq., which resulted in the death of a Tenenbaum family pet. Cash has returned to his post as Assistant Professor of English Literature at Brooks College, where his damage is now restricted to his students.
Readers are encouraged to instead seek out copies of Family of Geniuses by Etheline Tenenbaum or Three Plays by Margot Tenenbaum (both sadly out of print) or even Dudley's World by Raleigh St. Clair for far greater insight into what was once referred to as "the Cash Mystique".
Heralded as heir to Cormac McCarthy and Jay McInerney, Cash's struggles with mescaline doomed his grandiose literary ambitions, his implosion culminating in the crash of his '64 Austin Healy 3000 into the residence of Royal Tenenbaum, Esq., which resulted in the death of a Tenenbaum family pet. Cash has returned to his post as Assistant Professor of English Literature at Brooks College, where his damage is now restricted to his students.
Readers are encouraged to instead seek out copies of Family of Geniuses by Etheline Tenenbaum or Three Plays by Margot Tenenbaum (both sadly out of print) or even Dudley's World by Raleigh St. Clair for far greater insight into what was once referred to as "the Cash Mystique".
November 26, 2010
Cash is good, but he's not a genius.
September 1, 2012
It's written in kind of an obsolete vernacular.
November 29, 2012
My favorite part was when the wildcat...
Wildcat...
chi-poo-chickwildcat
I'm gonna go.
Wildcat...
chi-poo-chickwildcat
I'm gonna go.
March 17, 2008
Most historical accounts of the Battle of Little Bighorn focus on General Custer's Last Stand, a reckless demise of literary proportions. However, a few accounts challenge this alleged outcome, including this hypothetical historical narrative based on the presupposition that General Custer did not perish at the Battle of Little Bighorn. A sample of this stirring patriotic book:
The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.
The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.
October 7, 2013
Didn't even have to think about it.
July 29, 2012
Mediocre, at best. The language would get confused at times, and it seems apparent that the author's personality was imposed on the main character's motivations.
April 25, 2013
Upon review, I think, maybe, he didnt.
January 19, 2013
This book friscalates me to no end: Eli Cash can bust his flintcraw over my saddlecock any time!
February 14, 2011
This book gets a four for the concept, not the execution.
September 7, 2024
This is perhaps the worst story I have ever read. Overhyped, overly nihilistic, perhaps even overly sentimental in some eyes and appearing to possess depth while lacking it, unless...
March 21, 2014
Eli Cash is not a genius.
I mean especially he is not a genius.
So far the reviews aren't that good. But the sales are
I mean especially he is not a genius.
So far the reviews aren't that good. But the sales are
October 6, 2016
At times lapses into gibberish (probably attributable to the author's heavy use of mescaline) but still an interesting alternate history.
Read
September 20, 2019The prose is a little obscure, but good—not genius: "The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. 'Vámonos, amigos,' he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight."
November 20, 2014
I will go against the critical consensus and assert that Cash most assuredly IS a genius. Admittedly his work so far is extremely derivative of Cormac McCarthy, but was McCarthy himself not slavishly derivative of Faulkner until the publication of his fifth novel, Blood Meridian? Both men wear their canonical influences honestly and unashamedly, and this does not preclude genius because all books are made out of other books. Even Wildcat, Cash's lambasted debut, will undoubtedly be reappraised more favorably in coming years. His obsolete vernacular is so elegantly retrograde as to paradoxically be far ahead of its time. And one cannot deny the extraordinary resemblance, bordering on plagiarism, between Wildcat and Paul Thomas Anderson's script for There Will Be Blood, released a decade after Wildcat to universal acclaim.
As for Old Custer specifically, Cash's obsolete vernacular has been honed and refined. The baroque sesquipedalianisms of Wildcat have been replaced by a stark, minimalist diction reminiscent of Hemingway at his best. His prose is muscular, almost martial, as if to echo the feigned valiance of his protagonist, the cowardly centenarian George Armstrong Custer, who faked his own death in order to escape court martial before living for 65 more years as a hedonistic pimp in a Buenos Aires whorehouse and then finally being struck by an errant shell from a Nazi U-Boat raiding British shipping in the Rio de la Plata. Cash's inversion of the jingoistic martyrdom of Custer has more macroscopic ramifications, namely a deconstruction of the entire false mythology of the American West. Old Custer is a triumph of canonical proportions.
As for Old Custer specifically, Cash's obsolete vernacular has been honed and refined. The baroque sesquipedalianisms of Wildcat have been replaced by a stark, minimalist diction reminiscent of Hemingway at his best. His prose is muscular, almost martial, as if to echo the feigned valiance of his protagonist, the cowardly centenarian George Armstrong Custer, who faked his own death in order to escape court martial before living for 65 more years as a hedonistic pimp in a Buenos Aires whorehouse and then finally being struck by an errant shell from a Nazi U-Boat raiding British shipping in the Rio de la Plata. Cash's inversion of the jingoistic martyrdom of Custer has more macroscopic ramifications, namely a deconstruction of the entire false mythology of the American West. Old Custer is a triumph of canonical proportions.
June 13, 2012
This is my least favorite book by Cash. What worked well here was Custer's execution by the mundane, the trivial, the anti-epic of the every day. SPOILER ALERT: Did not care for the battle scene in the background between cavalry and Native Americans as Custer, now an old man, discusses the sort of uniforms worn at Little Big Horn. A for effort in miring us in the minutia of the time, but D- for the effect achieved. I was infinitely more interested in the fight to the death than the dull conversation. I suppose part of the problem was that I kept expecting a moment like the end of Joyce's The Dead when miring the reader in the trivia of the part becomes the whole point. Instead, the trivial occurs and the fighting flows out of the background, noted only by Custer's no longer asking the young man to speak up.
July 17, 2013
Eli Cash is *not* a genius.
February 24, 2014
"And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight."
Gives me shivers every time.
Gives me shivers every time.
November 15, 2016
I won't say Cash is especially NOT a genius. But what this book made me presuppose was...maybe he isn't?
September 22, 2020
A redoubtable epic in the picaresque tradition, Cash’s primary innovation in Old Custer is a brawny syntax that torques its characters ever deeper into the mythical space of the frontier. As Custer and his comrades penetrate the phantasmagoria of the Wild West, fantasies of racial cross-identification abound. While the protagonist’s Swiftian encounters with ‘Noble Savages’ and ‘Magical Negroes’ are sure to unsettle readers whose taste is curated by a slavish devotion to political correctness, it is this critic’s view that Cash’s novel is, in fact, subtly skewering the primitivist tropes and fantasies at the heart of white settler colonialism. In this light, Cash’s dalliance with ‘war paint’ during his infamous mescaline-fuelled joy ride of 2004 is less a callous act of cultural misappropriation than a piece of high-concept performance art—a parody of appropriation that disabuses attentive viewers of the myth of cultural belonging in a globalized world.
Despite frequent comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, Cash’s magnum opus is better considered a descendant of the revisionist Westerns that tore across the silver screens of the 1970s. Like McCarthy, Cash embraces a masculinist nihilism that posits violence as the sole force capable of securing safety—and selfhood—within the swirling chaos of a meaningless world. But where McCarthy’s pessimism is tempered by his apparent belief in the revitalizing function of mythopoeic language, Cash’s self-conscious citation of cinematic tropes constitutes a postmodern reflexivity that reveals “myth” to be a little more than a pernicious encrustation of misguided hope for a stable worldview. Gone is the whimsy of Richard Brautigan’s The Hawk-Line Monster; nowhere in view is the playful slapstick of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Inspired more by the cinematic sheen of ultraviolence that characterized Sam Peckinpah’s best films, Eli Cash has written a monumental paean not to the American Frontier itself, but rather to our collective fantasies about it, fantasies forever receding into the horizon of a reality that never was.
One can only speculate about how Cash’s career may have skyrocketed, had the infamous film adaptation of Old Custer, one of the greatest movies never made, brought his legendary vision to the masses. Originally helmed by Robert Altman before his death in 2006, producers effectively tanked the project when they tapped Gore Verbinski to direct. As Verbinksi replaced Guy Pierce’s Custer with an impetuous Johnny Depp, who insisted upon playing the roles of Custer and his Lakota adversary Crazy Horse, the film buckled under the weight of competing egos. The travesty that emerged nearly a decade later, re-titled The Lone Ranger, can be said to have definitively ended Cash’s career, and even, perhaps, his life itself, for the timing of his death by overdose in 2014 (a mescaline and peyote cocktail, it is rumored) is nothing if not conspicuous. And yet, Cash’s legacy lives on, just as Old Custer did, remaining with us for all eternity.
Despite frequent comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, Cash’s magnum opus is better considered a descendant of the revisionist Westerns that tore across the silver screens of the 1970s. Like McCarthy, Cash embraces a masculinist nihilism that posits violence as the sole force capable of securing safety—and selfhood—within the swirling chaos of a meaningless world. But where McCarthy’s pessimism is tempered by his apparent belief in the revitalizing function of mythopoeic language, Cash’s self-conscious citation of cinematic tropes constitutes a postmodern reflexivity that reveals “myth” to be a little more than a pernicious encrustation of misguided hope for a stable worldview. Gone is the whimsy of Richard Brautigan’s The Hawk-Line Monster; nowhere in view is the playful slapstick of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Inspired more by the cinematic sheen of ultraviolence that characterized Sam Peckinpah’s best films, Eli Cash has written a monumental paean not to the American Frontier itself, but rather to our collective fantasies about it, fantasies forever receding into the horizon of a reality that never was.
One can only speculate about how Cash’s career may have skyrocketed, had the infamous film adaptation of Old Custer, one of the greatest movies never made, brought his legendary vision to the masses. Originally helmed by Robert Altman before his death in 2006, producers effectively tanked the project when they tapped Gore Verbinski to direct. As Verbinksi replaced Guy Pierce’s Custer with an impetuous Johnny Depp, who insisted upon playing the roles of Custer and his Lakota adversary Crazy Horse, the film buckled under the weight of competing egos. The travesty that emerged nearly a decade later, re-titled The Lone Ranger, can be said to have definitively ended Cash’s career, and even, perhaps, his life itself, for the timing of his death by overdose in 2014 (a mescaline and peyote cocktail, it is rumored) is nothing if not conspicuous. And yet, Cash’s legacy lives on, just as Old Custer did, remaining with us for all eternity.
May 30, 2024
Eli Cash’s latest novel “Old Custer” presupposes what if Custer didn’t die at Little Big Horn? His outrageous assumption leads us to chart the course of American history in an entirely different manner and begs the question “what is the true reality of our history and what in reality is actually recorded fiction?”
In other words, how wrong can you be and still win the Nobel Prize? We see a great deal more on and near the interstates, America as it is and as it is becoming; the real thing, like it or not. The case seems prima facie: are we more likely to tear up I-95 between New York City and Washington, D.C., or to lay down four more lanes into Yosemite. The back-road journeys purporting to discover the real America are actually running away from the carnivorous beast.
In other words, how wrong can you be and still win the Nobel Prize? We see a great deal more on and near the interstates, America as it is and as it is becoming; the real thing, like it or not. The case seems prima facie: are we more likely to tear up I-95 between New York City and Washington, D.C., or to lay down four more lanes into Yosemite. The back-road journeys purporting to discover the real America are actually running away from the carnivorous beast.
February 28, 2025
Custer survives! Eli Cash reimagines him as a foppish gunslinger sipping sarsaparilla, fretting over his mustache wax as arrows zip by in polite pastel arcs. It’s less Blood Meridian, more Blood Merino—a frontier yarn spun by a haberdasher on a bender. Wildcat!
September 20, 2018
Forrest Gump goes to the Old West..
October 1, 2012
THANKS LINDSAY!!!!
February 22, 2016
Wildcat! Pkkkkkkkkkkkk!
August 8, 2017
Seriously sad that this guy never took his talent anywhere.
July 25, 2016
Truly, the Great American Novel.
September 4, 2016
These reviews aren't very good, but the sales are.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews