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Bucking the Tiger: A Novel, by Bruce Olds
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John Henry Holliday was an Ivy League-educated dentist from a genteel Georgia family when at the age of twenty-one he was diagnosed with consumption and given six months to live. Instead, over the next fifteen years, he composed of his sojourn on America's western frontier a paean to the ways in which a man might bluff death--and attain a measure of immortality.
In Bucking the Tiger, Bruce Olds uses a pan-dimensional, genre-blurring collage of original poems, reconstituted news accounts, adulterated epigraphs, song lyrics and photographs, simulated eyewitness testimony, fictionalized memoir, invented correspondence, re-imagined folk history--less to restore the past of a figure who in his lifetime was more thoroughly mythologized than Jesse James or Billy the Kid, than to re-story it entirely.
Evoking Doc Holliday's checkered careers as a frontier dentist, itinerant saloon gambler, professional faro dealer, and occasional shootist (including his involvement in the fabled gunfight at the OK Corral), Bucking the Tiger displaces the popular image of the Latin-spouting serial killer with the reality of a human being who, exiled to an emotional and physical landscape to which he was singularly unsuited, strove to make of his self-affliction an expression of sustained, if often violent, art.
- Sales Rank: #3248951 in Books
- Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published on: 2001-08-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.24" h x 5.79" w x 8.59" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
- Great product!
From Publishers Weekly
Although offered as a novel, this randomly organized fictional biography of John Henry "Doc" Holliday more closely resembles the cacophonous result of a three-way collision among a thesaurus, a Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and a well-researched history of the American frontier. The story is derivative if not imitative of other postmodern fictional efforts in the same vein, most notably Joseph Heller's God Knows and James Carlos Blake's The Pistoleer. Literary pretensions pockmark the narrative like bullet holes in an old barn's side, and consistency, clarity and narrative flow are discarded in the name of self-conscious styling and authorial wordsmithing. Olds (Raising Holy Hell) traces the life of one of the West's most notorious characters gambler, gunman, consumptive companion to the notorious and noteworthy through a variety of literary devices including mock testimonials, newspaper reports, essayistic commentary, stultifying poetry and personal narrative spoken by Holliday himself. Bits of movie dialogue, song lyrics, references to television programs and other deliberate anachronisms litter the text and distract the reader almost as much as encyclopedic listings of everything from patent medicines to card games to euphemisms for prostitution. Unconventional grammar sometimes apparently deliberate, sometimes not also undermines Olds's attempt to provide an iconoclastic fictional account that will reveal his subject and at the same time move readers to a closer understanding of one of the West's most sensational figures: the results are more tedious than triumphant. (Aug.)Forecast: Those who enjoyed 1995's Raising Holy Hell, a critically lauded account of the life of John Brown, will probably be receptive to this title. But traditional western fans will not be amused, and the subject matter makes it a hard sell for readers in the mood for postmodern pyrotechnics. A more engaging and better-written portrait of Holliday can be found in Robert B. Parker's Gunman's Rhapsody (Forecasts, May 14.)
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The subject of scores of books and movies for his hand in the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral, Doc Hollidaythe consumptive dentist turned cardsharp and gunfightermay have at last found his poet in Bruce Olds, whose 336-page cubist novel circles and approaches Doc from every conceivable angle: from the inside, through his lover Kate's eyes or those of acquaintances like Billy the Kid; through poetry and resonant lists of Doc's slang, manners, symptoms, sexual habits, or belongings (from ivory-handled Colts to his edition of Poe). Like Olds's collage-style novel about the apocalyptic Abolitionist John Brown, Raising Holy Hell, his portrait of Holliday is a compelling literary jumble of earthy monolog and ethereal narrative, with stray bits of research left lying about for atmosphere. (It's a Western novel that quotes Beckett.) Olds's Doc is more convincing than the uncharismatic, phlegm-hacking character of Paul West's novel OK (LJ 4/15/00). Those waiting for the Earp-Holliday gun team to take the field will have to wait several hundred word-rich, experimental pages, however, since language is as much the star here as the deadly exchange in Tombstone. But the story does slowly tilt toward the OK showdown, The way every Odyssey drifts west/ inchmeal/ towards its Iliad. An ambitious and rewarding work for all fiction collections.
- Nathan Ward, Library Journal
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
So many books and movies have featured Doc Holiday that there's little need for another unless the author takes a startlingly new approach. Olds attempts this with a shotgun assemblage of poems, quotations, fictional renderings, and "reportage." Kate Haroney, often depicted as shrewish and low, comes alive through Doc's eyes as a spirited frontierswoman whom he deeply loves. Doc himself is a southern gentleman, drawling and droll, a scholar. He is afflicted with consumption, the implications of which Olds discusses in detail. The diagnosis that he had six months to live--which Doc stretched to 15 years--defined him. Doc is gloomy, alcoholic, and violent. He is also brilliant as he contemplates what it means to be a walking dead man--to buck the tiger. Olds' technique is unsettling and results in a book hard to classify: a combined western, biography, and loose anthology of meditations on death. But as he did with John Brown in Raising Holy Hell (1995), Olds manages to pluck a real man out of the distortions of time and Hollywood myth. John Mort
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Doc Holliday Shines Bright In The Shadow Of Death
By Jeffrey J. Morey
In the popular imagination, John Henry Holliday is the fierce dark angel forever at Wyatt Earp's side. In "Bucking the Tiger", Bruce Olds tears away that public persona to reveal Holliday's ardent struggle to burn bright against the darkness. Doc Holliday's proclivities for dealing out death have been greatly exaggerated while his rage to live has gone mostly unnoticed. The reader follows Doc on his life's journey. We see John Henry's hurt and confused rage when, after his mother dies, his father remarries only a few months later. After he learns he is consumptive, we're with Doc as he goes West, takes up gambling and follows the professional circuit from Dallas to Deadwood, from Denver to Dodge City. We meet Wyatt Earp and travel to the dark and bloody town of Tombstone. We experience the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and its violent aftermath. Finally, we are there when Doc Holliday relinquishes his spirit with a quick drink and a wry joke. In covering Doc's story, Bruce Olds gives us more than just another historical novel. In this telling, Big Nose Kate Elder, Doc's inamorata, becomes a sustenance, an oasis of elan within Doc's ever diminishing life-world. When Holliday sojourned west, he didn't extend his life so much as prolong his death. "Bucking the Tiger" is thus a wide ranging reflection on mortality which refracts from Doc Holliday's life and legend back out again onto topics of universal concern. Near the end of the book, Doc writes that he "never intended for his life to resonate." But resonate it does, far beyond Doc Holliday's wildest imagination. Despite the dark subject matter, Olds provides remarkable outbursts of delightful humor. Old timer recollections of Doc are scattered throughout the book and many of these issue from characters in well known movies or TV shows. Steve McQueen's "Josh Randall" is identified as the author of "Fifty Years Spent Strapped to a Mare's-Leg". The "Mare's-Leg" being the odd sawed-off rifle McQueen lugged around on TV's "Wanted Dead or Alive". Few novels of any sort tackle profound questions with the adroitness of "Bucking the Tiger". Bruce Olds' way with the word is nothing short of miraculous. His command of history is nothing less than impressive. After this book, Doc Holliday will live on with the reader forever.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A bedazzling fever dream of a novel
By Bruce Trinque
Readers who demand a simple, chronologically linear narrative, please apply elsewhere. "Bucking the Tiger" is a fever dream of a novel, kaleidoscopic in its fragmented vision and very nearly hallucinatory in its voices. There is nothing straightforward about this book, an ambitious labyrinth largely made up of first person observations from Doc himself and Big Nose Kate and Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and Dodge City [women] and TV cowboy show heroes. Even Thomas Berger's Jack Crabb makes a walk-on appearance under another name. The Doc Holliday within its pages is something of a Gilgamesh in ancestry, one third man and two thirds cinematic image. In the Gunfight (almost) at the OK Corral segment - hands down, the best recreation of that event I have ever read - picture Val Kilmer in the starring role. And from that starting point, Olds delves deep into the mind of Holliday. When you pick up this book, prepare to be dazzled by pyrotechnics and perhaps occasionally daunted by its determinedly literary demeanor. Just don't expect Louis Lamour.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
"Like a tiger whose leap has failed..."
By Mary Whipple
Bruce Olds has talent coming out his pores, and we see it on glorious display here in his intense imagery, poetic prose, and earnest attempt to recreate the psychology of Doc Holliday, who knew for fifteen years that he would die of tuberculosis. Unfortunately, all this talent does not add up to a great novel, or even a good one. With a main character about whom little primary information is available, the author resorts to mountains of repetition of the small details that are known in order to flesh out a novel-length story.
Over fifty pages, for example, iterate and then reiterate, in only slightly different words, Holliday's realization that he will die from the tuberculosis which killed his mother, along with the symptoms of the disease, various names for it, and other famous people who died from it. None of these advance Holliday's biography, nor do similarly long sections which list, among other things, various names for whiskey, alternative words for prostitutes, types of gambling games, and ways to cheat. Newspaper excerpts describing Holliday, and quotations from people who knew Wyatt Earp, his friend, while interesting in an academic sense, are more like research than story, and they are merely presented, not integrated into a whole. The inclusion of pages of Olds's poetry, along with his e. e. cummings-like manipulation of typefaces and spacing, feels artificial, more an attempt to elevate a flat story than part of a sensitive and carefully thought out novel.
While some readers praise the author's attempt to bring Doc Holliday to life through the presentation of this collage, a technique which Michael Ondaatje does brilliantly and successfully in his The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, this reader found it an attempt to wrap a hollow box in a pretty package. Mary Whipple
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