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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

True West: David Means’s story about drifters and loners

Post from August 28, 2011 - delayed by power outage:
The David Means story, El Morro, in the current New Yorker is a pretty
good example of the Western drifter story – this kind of piece could
never work is set anywhere else in America, there’s something about
the wandering along the open roads of the West, aimless, escaping from
some unknown dreaded angst of the past, people shedding their
identities or concealing their identities, forming fitful alliances,
very American and very West – as in this story, in which a young
homeless girl gets picked up by an older guy with a car who drives her
through the desert and into Arizona, New Mexico, much of the time
keeping up a tedious monologue on, as she notes, 4 subjects, most
notably Indian lore (the Zuni tribe in particular) and on her life,
which he makes up for her as he goes along. This is the kind of guy,
charismatic and full of himself, who draws women, followere, or
acolytes for a short time till they completely see through him – as
this young woman is, but then they pick up another woman, working on a
road crew outside a major copper mine, and she makes them an odd trio,
as the guy gradually moves toward his new conquest leaving the waif
ever more isolated and lost. Strangely, it’s a tender story – she’s
kind of “rescued” toward the end by a park ranger who stops her from
vandalizing some old markings or petroglyphs – but it’s a story as
much about tone and atmosphere as anything, capturing the open a
mysterious landscape and the odd people moving through it.

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