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  • A Note On God's Country
  • Madison Smartt Bell (bio)

Percival Everett's third novel, Cutting Lisa, came to me in the mail in London, with a note from our mutual editor, Cork Smith—addressed to Percival Everett. I'd accidentally received the author's first copy of the book. Because of the cost of international mail, I sent back only a note describing the mistake. I kept the novel and read it with growing admiration. The story of a doctor who, for truly inevitable reasons, performs an abortion on his own daughter-in-law, Cutting Lisa is quick, efficient, ruthless. When I turned the last page I found the author photo and thought, before I could stop myself, "Oh, did it say somewhere those characters are black?"

Well, as a matter of fact it didn't. I read it again to be sure. Cutting Lisa doesn't mention what color the characters are. It isn't an issue. They are just people. Race doesn't come into it at all.

Race does come into God's Country, mainly because his whiteness is the best claim the narrator, Curt Marder, has to a right to exist. God's Country is Everett's second Western. The first, Walk Me to the Distance, is as starkly realistic as Cutting Lisa. Its narrator is a black man in a landscape where there aren't any others (not many people of any description, actually), and because his color isn't a consuming subject for him the reader doesn't hear much about it either; in Walk Me to the Distance, race is not an issue. But race, and every other kind of arbitrary social distinction, is always much on the mind of Curt Marder in God's Country, because he'd have no claim to any worth at all on his own merits.

The device of placing a no 'count rogue in a well-known historical setting has been perfected by George MacDonald Fraser, but Marder has none of the scurvy charm of Fraser's Flashman. What makes him comic is his obliviousness. Everett's realistic fiction is always about taxingly difficult moral choices; God's Country, a satire, presents those sorts of choices, too, but Marder unfailingly makes the very worst of them, and usually without realizing that there is a choice to consider. And that, we begin to see as the story unfolds, is Everett's bitterly ironic vision of How the West Was Won—by numberless versions of Marder making all their decisions out of the most narrowly circumscribed self-interest imaginable, and all in the unexamined belief that something like manifest destiny will carry them to the exalted level they believe to be theirs. Asked, toward the end, if he has "any dreams," Marder says, "I want me a lot of money and to be able to tell folks what to do and to have me a nice, big spread and to have my name mean something" (216).

In his reality, Marder can't tell hardly anybody what to do; grown white folks all despise him, and he has trouble making much of an impression even on small children. The only person he can pretend to boss around is Bubba, the black tracker [End Page 343] he has hired (though without capacity to pay him) to lead him through the Swiftian convolutions of the plot. Bubba is a sort of tragic hero opposed to Marder's contemptible buffoon, but we see him as it were through the wrong end of the binoculars, because Marder has no perception at all of the moral issues and conflicts that Bubba has to negotiate. Besides, Bubba is in some ways the classic Western hero: a man of few words (as very few words are safe for him to say), of long and frequent stillnesses, and less frequently, of totally committed and decisive actions—as different from Marder as black from white, or night from day. Where Marder spends all of his time in a fog of incomprehension he can't even recognize, Bubba has the kind of clarity that may come to someone whose moves are mostly forced; his last word, nearly, is "I...

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