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Page 11 September–October 2009 A Western Nouveau Roman Janet Kauffman It makes sense that a woman, a French woman, would write this countervailing Western, with its American cowboy riding off into the sunset—a last sentence write-off—following upon pages and pages of meandering and languoring in high comedic, inthe -dust-nouveau-roman, territory.What a landscape. Christine Montalbetti’s Western is a small book, but it’s crammed. A critique of plotted action, start to finish, it is slowed in motion, suspense denied by the impulse to linger, then linger longer. For most of the book, there’s no end in sight, just the language tracking one way, another, going off-road into extreme prose, intense and rich and so far beyond purple prose in its fabulous and often head-shaking convolutions, you have to marvel. It’s a very funny book. I laughed on every page, almost every page. And that hasn’t happened to me since laughing, for none of the same reasons, the whole way through Stanley Elkin’s The Living End (1979). What Western these days should not be a mish-mash of archaisms and extended analyses? Readers put off by excess will be put off. But Western’s narrator interposes and meanders so casually , so familiarly, it’s like walking in an abandoned, strewn place with a talkative Euro friend, holding magnifying glasses in both hands. What Western these days should not be a mishmash of archaisms and extended analyses—zoomed in, not out, a CSI of happenstance elements, exposing the ripest remnants of narrative, the dead-and-gone rot, so lovely? Western is a slow slow joy ride.You can’t skim. You feel all the words going by; they’re the road you’re on, and they give you a jolt of “the materiality of everyday things.” It helps to be a writer, or a certain kind of writer, to stick with this Western, the ride of it. The play and the pleasure is with narrative delays and language exposure, not in story, not in character—not in coming to know a particular cowboy, but in noticing the “ideogram that his body is delineating.” This is a Western slowed down so much that voices don’t reach the pitch of dialogue, and the young cowboy’s steps from his porch to Dirk and Ted’s place, not far away, move across many pages in super slow-mo.At the same time, it’s a simplified, stripped-down Western, through four plain chapters: “on the porch,” “at dirk and ted lange’s place,” followed by ”the siesta,” then “the duel.” There’s a requisite bow-legged, thirty-year-old cowboy, and the requisite gunfight at the end. Not at noon, but at sunset. But still. In the meantime, and the meantime is everything in this book, bodies shift in their clothes, people look at objects at Harry’s General Store, including Montalbetti as narrator-persona, she points out the ewers, the candlesticks, and speculates, what if you pick up a knickknack, take it home, and friends notice it and ask where it came from? “Ah, that, it comes from Western,” you’ll say, and tell about the thirtyyear -old cowboy, etc., which is as close to dialogue as we get in this book. And look at the removals we go through to get there. Minds wander in conversation here as elsewhere , and Montalbetti tracks them, along their “subsidiary paths.” Someone’s disquiet mind “undulates ”— as if his mind, yes, wearing swim fins and zipped into a waterproof suit, were diving into deep waters, down where the celestial light no longer reaches, with just a small lamp hooked, we can imagine it, onto the band holding his mask to his head, and following, in this manner, with a constant flutter of his ankles, the weak beam of light with which this lamp saws through the aquatic mass, to single out, here and there, a few flat beds of seaweed, a few stones pitted with every kind of cavity, a school of rather placid fish in whose brains there probably isn’t much in the way of thought either, and the muddy sand...

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