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Legacy of infamy resonates
By Antonya Nelson |
September 23, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE most notable feature of "Battleborn," the first story collection by Claire Vaye Watkins, is its physical landscape, especially as it affects the people who stake their claims on its inhospitable terrain. The reader is introduced to Reno's founders, both the notorious and the anonymous; to figures who are insiders as well as outsiders; to personalities with historical pedigrees and to ones concocted to perfectly fit the crime. The point of view roams, but the Nevada setting provides a hard ground on which the reader counts for stability. Although the individual stories stand alone, together they tell the tale of a place, and of the population that thrives and perishes therein.
"Ghosts, Cowboys," which opens the collection, can be read as a literary fractal of the book over all. The historical sits comfortably alongside the contemporary, and the factual nicely supplements the fictional. With this beginning, Watkins sets the terms for the reader's experience of the book, establishing the recurrent concerns of the collection: storytelling and myth-busting, knowing the past and surviving the present.
The events of "Ghosts, Cowboys" appear to have actually happened (or so says a shallow Wikipedia dip). The story works in the manner of a core sample: examine an isolated piece of real estate and plunge deep into its concentrated substance. The target spot is Reno; the unearthed substance is its legendary inhabitants and their legacy of infamy. Claire Watkins, author as well as narrator, understands that "the story" is "too much," yet she perseveres nonetheless to try to tell it true.
In real life, Watkins is the daughter of Paul Watkins, Charles Manson's sidekick, who later testified against Manson and explained the Helter Skelter motive. To the author's credit, she understands the lurid curiosity such a lineage commands. Yet, rather than treating the reading world to a memoir, this writer opts for not only fiction but short fiction in which to distill her subject. "Ghosts, Cowboys" is a dense and haunting story, told in the associative method of a poem, taking place over 150 years and populated by characters who invented the American West - miners, movie stars, millionaires, maniacs. Visionaries, in short, charismatics and opportunists; people prepared to impose a complete world order on an empty space.
In a life and landscape so overpopulated by mythmakers, where is a mere mortal to find footing? Claire Watkins, character, appears to take solace from the connective tissue it has been her challenge to cultivate. Over time, people connect, through floorboards, over riverbeds, across generations, and by telling one another's stories.
Many of these tales share a self-consciousness about the nature of story-telling itself, featuring characters whose interest is in making a narrative out of what is otherwise a mystery. "The Last Thing We Need" is told exclusively through a series of letters written by a man who has come across the debris of an auto accident. His fascination for the left-behind objects inspires his one-sided correspondence. The narrative he builds becomes his own story, rather than the story of the person or people who had the accident.
Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side - wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.
"Ghosts, Cowboys," which opens the collection, can be read as a literary fractal of the book over all. The historical sits comfortably alongside the contemporary, and the factual nicely supplements the fictional. With this beginning, Watkins sets the terms for the reader's experience of the book, establishing the recurrent concerns of the collection: storytelling and myth-busting, knowing the past and surviving the present.
The events of "Ghosts, Cowboys" appear to have actually happened (or so says a shallow Wikipedia dip). The story works in the manner of a core sample: examine an isolated piece of real estate and plunge deep into its concentrated substance. The target spot is Reno; the unearthed substance is its legendary inhabitants and their legacy of infamy. Claire Watkins, author as well as narrator, understands that "the story" is "too much," yet she perseveres nonetheless to try to tell it true.
In real life, Watkins is the daughter of Paul Watkins, Charles Manson's sidekick, who later testified against Manson and explained the Helter Skelter motive. To the author's credit, she understands the lurid curiosity such a lineage commands. Yet, rather than treating the reading world to a memoir, this writer opts for not only fiction but short fiction in which to distill her subject. "Ghosts, Cowboys" is a dense and haunting story, told in the associative method of a poem, taking place over 150 years and populated by characters who invented the American West - miners, movie stars, millionaires, maniacs. Visionaries, in short, charismatics and opportunists; people prepared to impose a complete world order on an empty space.
In a life and landscape so overpopulated by mythmakers, where is a mere mortal to find footing? Claire Watkins, character, appears to take solace from the connective tissue it has been her challenge to cultivate. Over time, people connect, through floorboards, over riverbeds, across generations, and by telling one another's stories.
Many of these tales share a self-consciousness about the nature of story-telling itself, featuring characters whose interest is in making a narrative out of what is otherwise a mystery. "The Last Thing We Need" is told exclusively through a series of letters written by a man who has come across the debris of an auto accident. His fascination for the left-behind objects inspires his one-sided correspondence. The narrative he builds becomes his own story, rather than the story of the person or people who had the accident.
Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side - wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.
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