The Williamsburg Public Library’s pick for today? Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey:
I’ll grant that Riders is not the Great American Novel. Grey’s colorful language has made him the target of punsters, who mock him as the “writer of the purple prose.” The dialogue is famously dreadful. The characters are odd and unnatural—in fact, the animals have more personality than the humans. And the book’s anti-Mormonism is so strident that some readers are permanently put off. But so what? It is vivid and weird and interesting. In it you will find—and I’ll open this up to argument—the most spectacular sense of place in American fiction.
My grandfather was a big fan of Grey and prized The U.P. Trail above the others, from what his son tells me. I read Riders a few months back: I agree with the indictments above. A craftsman, he wasn’t, but he could spin a ripping yarn. The anti-Mormonism is excessive, but having read Under the Banner of Heaven around the same time, it didn’t bother me too much. And the dialog and characterizations are a bit off, with archetypes — the righteous gunfighter with a personal score to settle — standing in for flesh and blood people. But it’s not the Tay Bridge Disaster, by any stretch.
I just read the Border Trilogy, Westerns of a more modern era, with more modern themes and substantially more nuanced writing, and they both have their strengths. McCarthy is obviously a better craftsman, but Grey has a love of his genre, the atmosphere of his books, that makes his other sins forgivable. I can’t say that about all his books, though.