Revisionist novels are sweeping away some of the literary genre\u2019s most calcified myths.<\/b>
\nA gentleman comes from the East Coast to make his fortune. When the train lets him off in a dusty Wyoming town, he encounters an array of cowpunchers, card sharps, and ne\u2019er-do-wells, whose coarse manners shock and intrigue him. At the saloon, he\u2019s treated to their opinions on the local women, as well as one man\u2019s boast that he never forgets a face\u2014so long as that face is white. A game of cards nearly turns into a shootout when one man calls the newcomer a \u201cson-of-a\u2014,\u201d causing him to lay his pistol on the table and utter what will become the story\u2019s catchphrase: \u201cWhen you call me that, smile.\u201d So begins Owen Wister\u2019s The Virginian, considered by some to be the first Western novel. Published in 1902, it became a mega\u2013best seller, made Wister rich, and helped popularize an international genre of literature and film. The Virginian doesn\u2019t get a lot of attention anymore, but its basic tropes are still what many readers think of when they picture a Western: a bunch of white men shooting at one another, or at Indigenous people, who enter the story as faceless antagonists if they enter it at all. But the past several years have seen the rise of a different kind of Western novel. The genre has been evolving for some time, with TV shows like Deadwood and films like No Country for Old Men and Hell or High Water offering a twist on the usual formula. And recently, a number of authors have upended it further, in the process sweeping away some of its most calcified myths. The protagonist of Hern\u00e1n Diaz\u2019s 2017 novel, In the Distance, for example, takes the opposite of a traditional hero\u2019s journey; instead of trying to conquer Western land, he seeks to disappear into it. In T\u00e9a Obreht\u2019s 2019, Inland, cowboys and outlaws are replaced by a camel driver, an exasperated mother, and visitors from the afterlife. And in How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang\u2019s 2020 debut novel, a Chinese American prospector\u2019s daughter forges her own path across California after her family is kicked off their claim. These novels preserve some aspects of the old Westerns: the parched vistas, the isolation, the high-stakes emotion of characters running afoul of the law. But they also call into question the genre\u2019s basic premise: the idea of the frontier as a place to be mastered and overcome. Instead, the Western becomes a way of thinking about humans\u2019 relationship to land, the past, and the idea of home. \u201cIf the Western is the expansion of America, I wanted to question who or what is American,\u201d Zhang told me in an email. \u201cIf the Western is about nostalgia, I wanted to complicate that nostalgia through immigrant characters who simultaneously feel the tug of inherited nostalgia for another land.\u201d Indeed, the protagonists of recent revisionist Westerns are tugged not merely West to make their fortunes, but in more complex directions. In Diaz\u2019s In the Distance, for example, a Swedish boy named H\u00e5kan tries to sail to New York with his brother, but gets on the wrong boat and ends up alone in San Francisco. His search for his brother leads him to travel against the flow of settlers; as Lawrence Downes wrote at The New York Times in 2018, he instead goes \u201cwest to east, around in circles, down into the earth, and north to Alaska.\u201d H\u00e5kan becomes an outlaw, but is the most unwilling of gunslingers; after he slaughters a band of thieves for assaulting the woman he loves, he is so consumed with shame that he lives largely as a hermit for decades, digging a warren of subterranean caves and sheltering inside them. Dressed in rags and eating only what he can trap or gather, he is completely absorbed by the work of maintaining his underground burrow. \u201cHe seldom considered his body or his circumstances\u2014or anything else, for that matter,\u201d Diaz writes. \u201cThe business of being took up all of his time.\u201d Rather than conquering the West, in other words, H\u00e5kan becomes a part of it. T\u00e9a Obreht\u2019s Inland, too, offers a twist on the hero quest. Instead of a horse, Lurie Mattie rides a camel, his travels across the West inspired by the real-life United States Camel Corps. Like H\u00e5kan, Lurie is an immigrant; he arrived in the U.S. as a child from the Ottoman Empire. Unlike H\u00e5kan, he has an unusual gift, or curse: He can feel the desires of the dead. Obreht\u2019s other protagonist, Nora, is an Arizona homesteader who is haunted, too\u2014by the memory of Evelyn, her dead daughter, who still speaks to her. By the time Nora\u2019s story intersects with Lurie\u2019s, readers sense that neither will attain the standard Western hero\u2019s goal of laying claim to the land. But when Nora opens Lurie\u2019s canteen and gains, for a moment, some of his supernatural power, she\u2019s able to see a different future for herself. \u201cThis is the place,\u201d Obreht writes, \u201cuntil it isn\u2019t; her house\u2014until it isn\u2019t; no water and therefore no house, no paper, no town at all, one way or the other, no matter what; but then some other town, some other house, some house elsewhere, some new house in Wyoming; and Evelyn there\u2014Evelyn with her in the new house, after all.\u201d Ultimately, Nora\u2019s and Lurie\u2019s stories both raise the possibility of a home in the West\u2014in the world\u2014defined not by treaties or conquest or lines on a map but by the presence of loved ones, living or dead. The characters in Zhang\u2019s How Much of These Hills Is Gold are also forced to consider how to put down roots when owning land isn\u2019t an option. The story follows Lucy and her sibling, Sam, who must make their way in Gold Rush\u2013era California after the death of their parents and the cancellation of the family\u2019s claim. The latter occurs thanks to a racist law intended to target their Chinese American family: \u201cThe law strips all rights to gold and land from any man not born in this territory.\u201d The siblings take divergent paths through their grief and dispossession into adulthood. But when they reunite, they must make a decision about where their future lies. As Lucy makes that decision, she thinks back to her childhood environs, her memories inextricably tied up with love, family, and loss: While the old Westerns were about claiming land, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is about being \u201cclaimed by it,\u201d about how landscape and history combine to shape a human life. Diaz, Obreht, and Zhang all propose different kinds of relationships with land and place than those offered in conventional Westerns. And such relationships are sorely needed as America begins to reckon with its colonialist past and present. \u201cMany more of us should question who has rights to a place, and whose rights were stolen in the process,\u201d Zhang told me. \u201cNot necessarily in an antagonistic way, but in an empathetic way that is informed by the tangled, bloodied history of exploitation and violence that has led us up to this point.\u201d Throughout her novel, Zhang is clear about whose rights were stolen in the California hills\u2014not just Lucy and Sam\u2019s, but also those of the Indigenous people who lived there before the prospectors arrived. In old Westerns, by contrast, Indigenous people either don\u2019t appear at all or are presented as obstacles keeping white people from what should belong to them. In John Wayne movies, for example, \u201cwe oftentimes see the hero celebrated for killing people who look like me,\u201d Joshua Nelson, the chair of the University of Oklahoma\u2019s Film and Media Studies Department and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, told me. Perhaps for that reason, Indigenous writers and filmmakers have not always been interested in revisiting the tropes of the Western, Nelson said. \u201cThe Western has never been very much about American Indian people,\u201d he explained. \u201cSo, by and large, Indigenous folks have instead wanted to tell stories that were about them.\u201d Many of these stories, though they may not have the hallmarks of the revisionist Western, deal with issues of land and sovereignty in their own ways, Nelson said, citing works by Louise Erdrich and other Indigenous writers and filmmakers such as Jeff Barnaby and Sterlin Harjo. Erdrich\u2019s The Round House, for example, is about an Ojibwe woman who has been sexually assaulted near the border of reservation and United States land, calling into question which courts have jurisdiction over the case. The story follows her son, Joe, as he investigates the crime himself, coming to a greater understanding of trauma, law, and justice in the process. Stories such as this, by Indigenous creators, and neo-Westerns such as those by Zhang, Diaz, and Obreht are coming to the fore at a time of greater cultural attention to the many histories that have been papered over to make the myth of America. It\u2019s also a time when the land of the West is deeply at risk from climate change. \u201cWildfires raged through California while I wrote and edited and put out my novel,\u201d Zhang told me. And it\u2019s a time when authors continue to experiment with genre and play with time, in alternate histories like The Underground Railroad or fantasies like The City We Became. When The Virginian came out, and for decades after, \u201cthe frontier\u201d was a site of fantasy for many white readers. \u201cPractically every American male has at one time or another thought of himself as a cowboy or rancher,\u201d the novelist (and rancher) Struthers Burt wrote in his 1951 introduction to the text. But today, the so-called frontier can be a site of reimagining\u2014of how to live on land without possessing it, how to make a home without stealing someone else\u2019s, and how to tell the story of the past in a way that informs the future. \u201cTo me, the true DNA of the Western is nostalgia,\u201d Zhang said. \u201cWesterns exist at the trembling edge between one world and another.\u201d To be sure, How Much of These Hills Is Gold and novels like it look to the past for inspiration. But they also look outward, inviting readers not simply to imagine themselves as \u201ca cowboy or rancher,\u201d but to envision other lives, other journeys, and, perhaps, other worlds.<\/p>\n