Silver Light

by David Thomson

Thomson's rangy metafictional collage blends figures from history and legend as well as characters from Hollywood films in an endlessly inventive cinematic meditation on the American West. Two characters dominate the novel's foreground: a Georgia O'Keeffe-like figure, photographer Susan Garth, shrewd, cantankerous, reclusive, and still self-reliant at 80, and her longtime friend Bark Blaylock, a western writer/filmmaker who may be Wyatt Earp's son. A subplot involves James Averill, a wealthy Easterner who sees his philandering as a frontiersman's quest for knowledge. As the time frame shuttles between 1950 and the late 1800s, we meet Susan's father, a gentlemanly cattle rancher who reads Thomas Hardy, and serves as a springboard to the Old West of Bat Masterson, Geronimo and Billy the Kid. The cast includes Willa Cather, Montgomery Clift, Charles Ives, Judge Roy Bean and numerous characters smuggled in from such movies as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Thomson's ( Suspects ) artfully juxtaposes the brimming frontier of legend against a construct of the West as a constricted wilderness of the soul.

From Publishers Weekly

Genres: Film, Novels, Westerns, Fiction

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1990

About the author

David Thomson, renowned as one of the great living authorities on the movies, is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fifth edition. His books include a biography of Nicole Kidman and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson is also the author of the acclaimed "Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. Born in London in 1941, he now lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've long loved this author's (and famous film critic's) novel Suspects and so was excited to stumble upon this one, where he plays around with classic Westerns, rather than film noirs, expanding upon the lives of various characters from films like Red River, The Searchers, and Heaven's Gate, following them after the movies end and mixing them with actual historical figures and a few characters created expressly for the book. The novel consists of a few intertwined narratives -- including that of an old woman who was an early photographer, a boy who may be the son of Wyatt Earp and who grows up to be a writer of dime-store western novels, and Matthew Garth, Montgomery Clift's character from Red River -- and various letters and transcripts of tapes help tell their stories. It's part western adventure tale, part love story, part meditation on art and the West, and part family saga. I know, sounds like a lot, but it all holds together somehow and is for sure never boring with its constantly shifting focus and some really beautiful writing. There's a river crossing scene that is one of the greatest action bits I've ever read. Seek this out if you love the old myths and the hard truths of the West as much as I do.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stylistic follow up to Suspects, which was based in film noir, Thomson bases many of his Silver Light characters on characters from Westerns—Red River, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And then traces their connections and interactions with each other and real figures from the old West, like Judge Roy Bean, John Ford, and Pat Garrett. One might say that he’s simply repeating himself, using the same style as Suspects. He is, but it’s fun to see how far he takes the connections, although it doesn’t work as well as in Suspects. There, he had something to say about family and failure (“We’re all suspects.”). In Silverlight his point is narrower; deconstructing the Western genre. He has it all—cattle drives, saloon girls, even the Gunfight at the OK Corral. He really strains to make all his connections work, which he does in short chapters which skip back and forth through time. Maybe not for those who aren’t familiar with Westerns, like Suspects was really for film noir fans. If you are a fan, then it’s an interesting read.