If I had a six-shooter (and didn’t work in the District), I’d be firing it off in celebration of “Doc,” Mary Doria Russell’s fantastic new novel about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. Since winning top honors for her science fiction 15 years ago, Russell has blasted her way into one genre after another, and now she’s picked up the old conventions of the Wild West and brought these dusty myths back to life in a deeply sympathetic, aggressively researched and wonderfully entertaining story.
“Doc” is no colorized daguerreotype; it’s a bold act of historical reclamation that scrapes off the bull and allows those American legends to walk and talk and love and grieve in the dynamic 19th-century world that existed before Hollywood shellacked it into cliches. (Stay tuned: Next year Val Kilmer will star in “The First Ride of Wyatt Earp.”) With open disdain for those low-down, stinkin’ writers who prefer “well-dressed drama to bare-naked fact,” Russell can evoke plenty of grandeur and hell-raising without squaring every lawman’s jaw and waxing every villain’s mustache to a deadly point. And just to prove it, she mentions that famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral several times in these 400 pages but then draws her story of Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers to a perfect close before they ever get to Tombstone. Take that, dime novels.
“He began to die when he was 21,” Russell writes at the opening, “but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle.” The whole novel takes place in the shadow of that death sentence, which Dr. John Henry Holliday postponed with a rough mixture of fury, gentility and bourbon. Born in Georgia in 1851 with a cleft palate, Holliday had already beaten the odds just by surviving infancy, but his wealthy mother was determined that her son would speak like a gentleman and receive the classical education his fierce intellect deserved. He grew up on Virgil and Homer, and from beginning to end Russell casts his tragic life not in terms of Old West myths, but of those far older heroes who were his boyhood models. “The Fates pursued him from the day he first drew breath,” she writes, “howling for his delayed demise.”
How this smart, talented young man constructed his life under these deadly conditions is the true subject of Russell’s affecting novel. Her Doc Holliday is a person of great pride and Southern refinement who finds his ideals shredded by illness and economic necessity. Trained in dentistry (as opposed to medicine, which at the time was for quacks), he’s determined to relieve the suffering so common among people who have never seen a toothbrush. Problem is, he can make a year’s wages in a good night of card playing, and alcohol is the only thing that keeps those razor-sharp coughs from slicing up his lungs. You can’t help but feel your throat clench in sympathy as he strains for breath.
Although it sometimes reaches back to pre- Civil War days and refers to events ahead in the 20th century, “Doc” focuses on Dodge City, Kan., in 1878. Russell captures this wildest of the Wild West towns in all its mud-stained virility. “Front Street was alive with young men,” she writes. “Sauntering, staggering. Laughing, puking. Shouting in fierce strife or striking lewd whispered bargains with girls in bright dresses. They were giddy with liberty, these boys, free to do anything they could think of and pay for, unwatched by stern elders, unseen by sweethearts back home, unjudged by God, who had surely forsaken this small, bright hellhole in the immense, inhuman darkness that was west Kansas.” This is a town caught in the swift confluence of national changes. Brawling saloons and accommodating whorehouses are locked in a death match with new forces of respectability and temperance, all greased with astronomical sums of money. The “city had a single purpose,” Russell writes, “to extract wealth from Texas. Drovers brought cattle north and got paid cash. Dodge sent them home in possession of neither.”
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