San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Women of the West
“The Removes,” a new novel by Tatjana Soli, promises so much: a narrative of the American West centered on women, a kind of remaking of the classic Western myth.
The book tells the interlocking stories of the marriage between Libbie Custer and her husband, Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer, and the captivity of a white woman named Anne Cummins after an Indian massacre at her family’s homestead. It’s a deeply researched historical novel, mostly faithful to the arc of known events, that moves chronologically but across perspectives. The book sweeps across the years between the Civil War and Custer’s famous Last Stand.
The women’s perspectives are central to the novel. Libbie Custer is a compelling character, a fierce woman devoted to an unfaithful but passionate husband, who loves battle above all else. Their romance, with its ups and downs and pushes and pulls, is a constant as the story moves across time and space. Anne, the captive, is a great endurer of unimaginable losses. The women in the book are constantly waiting, suffering, losing, hardening.
“The Removes” is fundamentally about violence of all kinds. There is violence by Indian to settler, violence by soldier to Indian, violence by the frontier to those who live on it, violence by man to woman. It is this last kind of violence, which crosses racial lines, that Soli’s novel is most concerned with: what the West does to the women, and what the men in the West do to them.
The resulting novel is sadly stilted. Soli, who has written three novels, employs an awkward prose style in “The Removes,” a stark departure from the voices in her earlier work. Her sentences borrow constructions from the time period she’s writing about, but they work oddly, as though she’s trying on shoes that are a bit too small. “They remained in the winter camp for more than a week, but even such rest did not recuperate Anne from her fallen condition,” she writes. The novel is heavy on exposition and foreshadowing, also perhaps relics best left behind.
The book is laden with references — to “Blood Meridian,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Macbeth,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Little House on the Prairie,” Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative. Throughout, Soli also sprinkles in historical sources: letters from George Custer, frontier photos, battle casualty estimates, a map. Yet it is hard to know what to do with all of this, as the novel doesn’t quite stand on its own.
It drags. The book moves in and out of battle, then back to the waiting Libbie, then back to the suffering Anne. It moves almost cyclically through unimaginable weather, through slaughter, through joyful reunions, through painful betrayals. It provides a harsh picture of frontier life that loses momentum and becomes repetitive. Certainly this repetition may be accurate to the experience of a soldier’s wife, of a captive, of a soldier, of frontier existence, but it can be a chore to read.
There are of moments of wonderful description. Soli paints pictures that will stick in my head: a snowstorm that nearly kills, soldiers happening upon a patch of berries and eating themselves into bliss, Libbie planting trees in Dakota territory that bloom and wither.
“Domesticity was doomed by great clouds of dust that dimmed the sun, shortened the horizon, and eddied great sheets of tan, adhering to doors and windows, dusting furniture and floors, so thoroughly coating them that even the hue of their clothes took on the tint of sepia,” she writes. It is often in descriptions of place that Soli hits her stride, and this breaks up the monotony.
In a note at the end of the book, Soli writes, perhaps defensively, that she is interested in “the pendulum swing from simplistic descriptions of Indian warfare in the old Hollywood Westerns to the opposite but equally false ones in more current books and films. … We honor the past most when we depict it as accurately as possible without contorting it to contemporary mores.” It is not clear exactly which current books or films Soli means, but I imagine she is defending against a charge that may be leveled against “The Removes”: that her narrative isn’t a useful contribution to the dialogue about colonialism, genocide and race relations in early America.
It seems fair to ask: On the heels of centuries of overwrought racist captivity narratives, why center a large part of a novel on a white woman taken captive and raped repeatedly? What does a writer like Soli owe, if anything, to the general balance of history? I don’t think there are simple answers. I also don’t think her novel is simplistic in its portrayals of race relations; she grapples, to an extent, with the complexities. But in the end, it was the prose more than the politics that felt like a disappointment.
Sophie Haigney is a freelance writer. Her pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Paris Review. Email: books@sfchronicle.com