NYRB Classics Spotlight: Butcher’s Crossing

Malvern staff member Fernando is a New York Review Books Classics enthusiast, and he has an excellent recommendation for y’all…

Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams

There’s something like a quiet magic in the art of the “meaning of life” western, as opposed to a violent, shoot-em-up kind of western. This book is perhaps the kind of western Herman Melville would have written—it retains elements of realism yet elevates moments into the realm of the epic:

But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year.

To aficionados of the genre, this book is considered the greatest western written in the late twentieth century, along with Warlock by Oakley Hall. They make a good pair, really—Hall’s Warlock is the shoot-em-up kind of western, and can also be found in the NYRB Classics catalog. They’re both must-haves for fans of the western genre.