THE HOMESMAN

by Glendon Swarthout ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1988

One of Swarthout's (Skeletons, The Old Colts, The Melodeon, etc.) best westerns in a long time: the story of a man and a woman leading a party of insane women back to civilization in the 1870's. Mary Bee Cuddy is a 30-ish spinster, tough as nails but yearning for a man, who has set up a nice homestead out near the town of Loup, in Oklahoma Territory. Other women aren't so lucky--living in sod huts during a wild winter, with brutish husbands who treat them like beasts of burden, with children who die wholesale of dyptheria, they go insane. This year, it's Cuddy's job to take them back across the plains to the relative civilization of Iowa. She takes along a lowdown type--a ""cull""--named John Briggs, a deserter from the cavalry who has been claim-jumping, and whom she has saved from lynching. Together, Cuddy, Briggs, and four crazy women face ice storms, Indians and mule-train drivers with rape in their eyes--but when Cuddy seduces Briggs one night (after he refuses to marry her), the guilt is too much for her God-driven conscience: she hangs herself from a lone prairie tree. Briggs is faced with a choice--abandon the women, as he had originally secretly planned, or fight to take them in to safety. He does the latter, of course, inspired from the grave by the memory of Cuddy's sharp tongue. Swarthout takes a big chance in killing off, early on, Mary Bee Cuddy, who is essentially the viewpoint character here--but it pays off in a novel that grows from the story of a somewhat cute True Grit-ish sort of relationship to an absorbing western epic of endurance.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION