****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
AN AMERICAN OUTLAW is a book as hardbitten as the deserted, arid terrain upon which it is set; as troubled as the toll war takes upon those who endure it; and as assured a first novel as I have seen in a long time.John Stackhouse has created a book whose prose is as terse as a telegram:"...A uniform officer opens up. Lieutenant's white shirt. Early thirties. Buzz cut hair.Whicher puts his hand out. Takes the lieutenant's; the strong side of firm..."It's like that throughout, a book that says no more than is necessary to convey its story. As Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon: "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them." There are numerous instances one can surmise Stonehouse knows this life: from his knowledge of the flora and fauna of the Texas wasteland to his vivid yet clipped descriptions of guns, law, and the Gulf War.AN AMERICAN OUTLAW is, in its briefest form, a tale of psychologically wounded men who rob institutions, and of the lawmen who hunt them down. As such, the title is symbolic in its simplicity: this is a story about Americans forced to break their former bond with the country that spawned them, and it is also the story of equally good Americans who must enforce the law. It is also a tale that tries to make sense of the juncture between those twin but opposite forces. There are good men in this story, but it is not always an easy task to identify them. Ironically, just as there are those who have come back from combat and found that their old, once-comfortable world is now foreign to them, they also discover their very outcast status can at times be best served by the skill set taught to them THROUGH combat. Indeed, this may be one of the bizarre truths that we can take from these wars and the soldiers who fought them: we have created a class of citizens who have found in war an expression of being that has warped what it is to be human, to be a citizen, and to be American, and in doing so have made these men into new men foreign to the country that created them.The novel focuses primarily upon two different men who stand at opposite poles, yet find they are not unlike one another: Texas marshal John Whicher and Gulf War veteran Gilman James. And it is here that the "gulf" is symbolic as well, as he and other returning vets have found themselves dismissed so easily by the country they have served that they have turned to crime for their own purposes, to right purposeful wrongs done to them as they served the very country that turned against them. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, may be the clinical name for the symptom suffered by those who have suffered harrowing, life-altering injuries, but the emphasis on "injury" belies what may be the real cause for so many who suffer upon their return. In point of fact, it is not always the faraway country that is the site of the truly debilitating injury, but in many ways our own.I sincerely liked AN AMERICAN OUTLAW, and not solely because of the hardscrabble dialogue and descriptions. (In fact, I think there might be as many of those who like the style as those who found 277 pages of it cumbersome: "I turned to look at the group of buildings. Mud brown walls. An outpost, all it was. End of the line....Mules. Sheep, maybe. Desolate, my reckoning. The day they built it, and every day since.") But it is an organic component that fits the setting, the characters' mindset, and the theme of the story. These are men who have chewed on life like a wad of tobacco and found it impossible to swallow, spitting it out in short, staccato phrases devoid of articulate architecture of language. The words that serve them best are those stripped of sentimentality and romanticism...only using words that reflect place, time, action, and personage in the least ornate way possible.I also liked AN AMERICAN OUTLAW because it told a coherent story that may have seemed slow at first, denuded as it was of prosaic color. But once the story gets going the tale it tells is compelling enough to spur you on to each succeeding page, convinced there is no way this can end well for anyone.While the story is stripped down, it is still rich. As I read the novel I felt the tension of the chase, the articulation of anger at the wrong America has occasionally done its soldiers, and the blending of the intellect AND "gut" when it comes to the hunt-- from both sides of the chase. And yes, I will also admit that there were times I felt frustrated by the constant need for brevity...without being specific and creating spoilers, suffice it to say that there were times I wished the author would give JUST A BIT more detail. In the interest of maintaining control over his prose, there are moments where Stonehouse clips off the chapter, or a passage, at a point where I have NOT had enough information for my needs. This can be frustrating at times, I admit. But I accept it as the author's prerogative.There was one battle between outlaws and lawmen in particular that impressed me with not only its action, but it's utter cleverness: I truly saw no way for anyone to escape a situation as hopeless as this one was. But the characters, like Stonehouse himself, drew upon military training and field tactics to scrounge out a wholly believable escape as amazing as anything Hollywood could have come up with, and ten times more proper to the story.My hat is off to author John Stonehouse, and I look forward to his next novel.
