Before she could say a word, he reached out and stuck his hand in the collar of her dress and ripped it down to her waist so that her breasts bounded out bare under the yellow light. I guess Florence had never seen a man so big. The Man from Bodie drank down a half bottle of the Silver Sun's best that cleared the dust from his throat and then when Florence, who was a redhead, moved along the bar to him, he turned and grinned down at her. The book opens with two great paragraphs that plunge us right into the middle of the action in no-nonsense fashion: One of the things I like best about Welcome to Hard Times is the control Doctorow has over the language, as sure and firm as a well-seasoned cowboy in the saddle who refuses to let the bronc get away from him. I’ve never met a literary cowboy as fearsome as the Man from Brodie-think Jack Palance in Shane….then multiply him by ten. Here, the Old West is pure invention and it’s pure terror. If you’ve read those books, however, and come to Welcome Hard Times expecting to see historical figures like Billy the Kid or Wyatt Earp woven into the narrative, you’ll be disappointed. As in his other novels like Ragtime, Doctorow celebrates the endurance of the American spirit. There is no High Noon Gary Cooper here, Doctorow seems say as he illustrates that famous saying: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”ĭoctorow is pretty heavy on the symbolism here-the Earth is scorched, the phoenix rises, the will of man triumphs. While the Man from Bodie is rampaging through the early pages of the book, the stunned and frightened citizens go jelly-legged-especially after the MFB’s first victim, one brave man who dared to confront the villain with a single stick of wood, comes reeling out of the saloon doors with his head bashed in and dies before the sun goes down. It’s also about how the oppressed citizens rebuild their hope in the wake of complete disaster. Welcome to Hard Times centers on how the town (if that’s what you can call a few ramshackle board-and-tarpaper buildings) is rebuilt from its ashes. The cowboy with no name is known simply as the Man from Bodie and once he destroys the North Dakota town of Hard Times (those events listed above all happen in the first chapter, by the way), he rides off into the horizon…momentarily leaving the rest of Hard Times’ diverse set of characters to pick up the pieces. Everything else on today’s to-do list can wait. I’m practicing what I preach: this morning, I picked up the novel and started re-reading it for the third time. There’s nothing pretty inside these pages but once you start reading, I dare you to set the book down again. Published in 1960 (and made into a not-as-good movie starring Henry Fonda in 1967), it’s a grim look at the Old West. Welcome to Welcome to Hard Times, Doctorow’s first novel.
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