Heart of the Country
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3.8 • 18 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
This epic Gothic Western about a half-Indian outcast who becomes a famous buffalo hunter is “a big sprawling novel of the West as it really was” (The Denver Post).
Perhaps Joe Cobden was always destined to be an outcast. His Indian mother died in childbirth, alone on a stagecoach road under a pitch-black prairie sky. His white father abandoned him in the name of his own ambition. The wife of the doctor who adopted him despised him for his mixed race. His classmates teased him for his curved spine. Joe leaves nothing but pain behind as he lights out for the Kansas frontier.
It is the 1870s and Joe makes a name for himself as a famed buffalo hunter, tracking a phantom white buffalo from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. But his glory days as “Joe Buffalo” die as quickly as the slaughtered herds, and he finds himself forced to settle in Valley Forge, where the townsfolk each hide their own twisted secrets.
“[A] gutsy, raunchy, rough, blunt, down-to-earth (or mud) novel in which little is sacred,” Heart of the Country paints a broad panorama of a demythologized American West, populated with unforgettable—and often unforgivable—characters, brought to life with stunning imagery and bold, baroque prose (Los Angeles Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If the vast buffalo herds that still roamed Kansas in the mid-19th century were in some sense the heart of the country, then the white pioneers committed some kind of spiritual suicide by wiping them out. So suggests this sprawling and doggedly fanciful tale by the Australian author of The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The central figure in a cast of energized puppets, of whom most are either insane or malicious, is Joe Cobdenillegitimate, half-Indian, fated both by his birth and the buffalo-like hump on his back to be a social outcast. Joe starts his working life as a hunter of buffalo, then regrets his role in their destruction and turns to making cigar-store Indians, while rearing the ingrate son of a pious lunatic. The story includes incest, murder, whoring, drunkenness, opium taking, ghoulish burial and shovelfuls of insanity, as well as a spectral white buffalo, among other echoes of Moby-Dick. Dickens (with whom Matthews has been capriciously compared) could treat reality in a fanciful manner; Matthews treats fancy as though it were reality. His story is enjoyable by dint of its vitality, but also exasperating because of its lack of clarity and substance. BOMC alternate.
