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Oct 07, 2014lukasevansherman rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
I went from never having heard of John Williams (not to be confused with the composer) to thinking of him as one of the great neglected American novelists of the second half of the 20th century, even though he only wrote four books, the first of which he disavowed. Despite his small output, these books are incredibly different from one another. "Stoner" (1965) is a deliberately paced, Jamesian novel about an English professor, "Augustus" (1972) is a historical novel about the Roman emperor (and winner of the National Book Award), while "Butcher's Crossing" (1960) is a bleak western that predates similar work by Cormac McCarthy by decades. Despite being a quintessential American genre, we have very few truly great Western novels. There is a lot of pulp, a few classics ("Little Big Man," "True Grit") and not much in between. "Butcher's Crossing" centers around a buffalo hunt, which is more a buffalo slaughter and it's this that Williams finds a symbol for the violence, darkness, and greed of the West. Those who like their westerns bathed in myth and romance will no enjoy this, but those who appreciate ambiguity and irony will find this a very interesting and satisfying take on the genre. "You're crazy. What are you trying to do? You can't kill every god damned buffalo in the whole god damned country."