The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Bucking the Tiger by Bruce OldsBrian Evenson
Bruce Olds. Bucking the Tiger. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 371 pp. $25.00.
Bruce Olds’s second novel follows his successful debut several years back, Raising Holy Hell, a fictionalized account of the life of John Brown. Olds assembled that first book from scraps of historical documents, newspaper accounts, private correspondence, reminiscences, recollections, and fiction, among other sources. The result was a burning, wavering image of a man: part mad, part angel, part devil. In Bucking the Tiger Olds employs the same strategy with the life of Doc Holliday, the consumption-wracked gambler and bogeyman of the Old West. Olds expands his literary range as well, working not only with historical documents but choosing at times to break such documents into verse and reenvisioning Doc’s life as poetry. In this he owes something to Paul Metcalf, who transformed nonfictional documents into mixed-genre poetry in works such as “I-57” and “U.S. Dept. of the Interior.” He owes something as well to Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid—though while Ondaatje’s poetry is the strongest portion of his text, Olds’s is the weakest. Bucking the Tiger explores Holliday’s life in incredible and varied detail, leading carefully up to the event that immortalized Holliday-the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-and then moving from there into his slow decline toward death. On either side, Olds presents views of Holliday, his lover, and his gambling and explores the nature of history and myth. Olds never allows us to forget Holliday’s illness and is marvelous in his ability to present Holliday as a man in decay. Ultimately, Holliday makes a less intriguing character than Brown did, for Brown was at the heart of an extraordinary conflux of ideas and tensions while Holliday simply is not. There is genuinely brilliant writing throughout, but the cumulative effect is slightly less than that of Raising Holy Hell. [Brian Evenson]