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(More customer reviews)Womanizing and hustling, gambling and drinking, horse-rustling and cross-dressing--Everett sends up the cliches and formulae of every Western novel you ever read. And the narrator Curt Marder, part-time husband and full-time loser, adds an all-important forgotten ingredient: "I had read what I could of the dime novels about the frontier . . . and generally the little books gave a fair account, but always failed to mention the smell." That's why cowboys tended to be quiet loners: "We came together in bars and churches more or less to assure ourselves that our smells were normal and not an indication of coming death."
The action begins when a band of marauders torch Marder's house and barn, kidnap his wife, and kill his dog. ("Killed your dog? What kind of heathens do we have in these parts?" "Efficient.") After gambling away the remains of his ranch, he enlists the help of the local tracker, Bubba, a pensive black farmhand with a reputation for getting things done. This unlikely duo travels the hills and vales of the Wild West, looking for Marder's captive wife--unless something more interesting crops up. Along the way, they have to avoid a country minister selling Bibles with only a few pages missing ("a bout of illness just as we pulled away from Kansas City saw the demise of most of Deuteronomy"), a two-bit hooker seeking revenge on nonpaying customers, inbred locals who will bury folks up to their necks for the entertainment value, and the spotlight-hogging swagger of the local army commander. ("My name is Colonel George A. Custer. Perhaps you've heard of me" "No, sir." "Drat.")
Page after page, the one-liners and the tall tales keep coming. But about two-thirds of the way through the book the tone shifts bracingly and unexpectedly when an ever-present threat in Bubba's life penetrates the fog of Marder's irresponsible tomfoolery--that a posse of vigilantes is often more than happy to lynch the first available black man whenever a crime is discovered. The author relentlessly spoofs the racial dynamics between whites and blacks and Indians; Marder's buffoonery is brilliantly offset by Bubba's gravity and by a local tribe's apprehension. Yet the book never stops being funny: even when the satire becomes acidic and shines a light on uncomfortable truths, Everett keeps the reader laughing at the story's situational absurdities, its characters' foibles, and our own racial attitudes. "God's Country" is one of the most hilarious--and somber--Westerns I've ever read.
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