Strange Cowboy
Lincoln Dahl Turns Five
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Sam Michel is such a smart, manic, virtuosic stylist . . . the kind of deep insights that make you suddenly and newly appreciative of the world around you."—George Saunders
There was a hot, high sun, a hard ground and a long way off to any certain water, and my wife, a tenderfoot, I thought, not immodest, seemed bent on ruined feet and spectacle, on making of herself to passing innocents a living proof of what could happen to a man and woman ventured too far off alone together in the desert. Yet who passed? Who could be so innocent? Snakes and ravens, rabbits, buzzards, toads-- these passed, these witnessed, and what could they have made from us?...I saw myself preceded by my wife. I wanted to follow her, feel what she felt; I thought that I might find myself absolved… Maybe I would get some. Somewhere in me was a cheerful voice assuring me that what this needed was our getting laid.
Here is the head of his home—the one to speak, surely—on the occasion of his son Lincoln Dahl Jr.'s fifth birthday. Wife and mother order him to engage with his boy, but he remains in his chair dreaming up the speech he'll give to convey his life and glory to his boy, meanwhile avoiding his child and all others, until forced from his chair. Here's cowboy Beckett, a man of wonder and excess.
Sam Michel is the author of Under the Light and Big Dogs and Flyboys.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Michel's stylistic new novel (after Big Dogs and Flyboys), Lincoln Dahl, a young father of introspective and hilariously fragile nature is in something of a psychic retreat from the relationships that define his life. He's distant with his son of the same name ("Your pictures look real good there, on the fridge"), fears his dying mother ("I have resolved to call her nothing, if not something on the lines of Mother"), and yielding to his impatient wife ("My wife believed she was the secret we were born desiring to recover"). But amid preparations for the younger Lincoln's fifth birthday party, the elder Lincoln promises, in a desperate attempt at fatherliness, to tell the story of his own fifth birthday. But instead his speech and thoughts become a fount of meditations on life, death, the terror of relationships, and all that confronts someone on the verge of conscious personhood. Eventually, the death of a dog named Hope forces father Lincoln to spend an unprecedented amount of alone time with his son. Though the novel consists of little story, it is funny, tender, thoughtful, and strange. But the real selling point is Michel's breakthrough prose.
