God's Country

by Percival Everett, Madison Smartt Bell (Introduction)

Overview

The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. It's 1871, and he's lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder is forced to enlist the help of the best tracker in the West: a black man named Bubba.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807083635
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	05/15/2003
Edition description:	First Beacon Press Edition
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	1,068,146
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Percival Everett is the author of eleven novels including the recent Erasure, which won the inaugural Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction. He lives with his wife on a small ranch and teaches at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

Launching the publisher's Callaloo series, dedicated to books by ``writers of African descent,'' this corrosively funny and disquieting picaresque novel addresses the politics of identity and the racist brutality that marked America's westward expansion after the Civil War. Everett's ( Zulus ) vernacular narration is voiced by Curt Marder, an inveterate bigot and scamp whose ``slender'' education and conscience are brought into high relief when his house is burned and his wife kidnapped by bandits. Compelled to enlist a ``tracker,'' an intrepid, mysteriously omniscient black man named Bubba, Marder sets off across God's country, a landscape of primeval beauty and frontier savagery. His episodic adventures in Native American camps and squalid cowboy towns, as well as an encounter with a cross-dressing Colonel Custer who eats raw meat and raves about ``the Emasculation Proclamation,'' display the author's delight in the scoundrels and carnivalesque humor of the untamed frontier. The butt of countless practical jokes, Marder is dressed in war paint, tied to a stake and buried in the ground up to his neck, yet despite his affinities with other migratory and marginalized characters of the frontier, he suffers no crisis of conscience or moral maturity. For Everett is finally less concerned with psychological complexity than with the racist legacy of Manifest Destiny; shot through this novel's cartoonish surface, right up to its astonishing, larger-than-life denouement, his grave historical ruminations are less portentous and far more troubling. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Continuing a tradition of writing somewhat offbeat novels, Everett (Zulus, Permanent Pr., 1990) offers this droll but confusing plunge into the Western genre. Curt Marder, Union Army deserter and indolent homesteader, watches from a safe distance as white renegades pillage his farm, carry off his wife, and, worst of all, kill his dog. After hiring a tracker, an ex-slave named Bubba, he sets off to recover a wife for whom he cares little. This antihero's odyssey is repeatedly sidetracked, bringing him into contact with a wild assortment of Western characters. Through it all, only Bubba, like Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, retains a tenuous grasp on what is right, thus gaining Marder's grudging respect. Everett then turns that mildly noble development upside down in the novel's unsatisfying end. Though Bubba is an interesting character, the plot is convoluted and doesn't make a great deal of sense. Part of the publisher's series of books from authors of African descent, this is not a necessary purchase.-Robert Jordan, Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City

Library Journal

This wild novel of the West is comic and fierce, turn by turn.”
—Nicholas Delbanco, author of What Remains

“An outrageously funny, alarmingly serious, highly enjoyable novel.”
—Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe

“Mr. Everett is successful combining heart with rage. . . . The novel sears.”
—David Bowman, The New York Times Book Review

“I loved this book. God’s Country is like no Western I’ve ever read before: a wonderfully strange and darkly hilarious brew of Kafka and García Márquez, of Twilight Zone and F-Troop. Percival Everett has written . . . a Wild West road trip that challenges our assumptions about what human dignity really means.”
—Bret Lott, author of Jewel: A Novel

Praise for Percival Everett:

“Percival Everett’s talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance that could place him alongside Wright and Ellison as he skewers the conventions of racial and political correctness.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Everett is one of the most unpredictable and original novelists working today.”
—Michael Schaub, NPR

“Everett is a true American genius, a master artist.”
—Carole V. Bell, Oprah Daily

“It’s hard . . . to imagine a novelist today with fresher eyes than Percival Everett.”
—Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher