Mark Sutton
speaker
695 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2018
last heard Jul 2020
Mark Sutton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm not sure if you've ever read this.
It's by the author John Williams.
And he, I think, is one of the more fascinating American authors.
He...
He wrote a book called Stoner, which a lot of people in the last few years have kind of rediscovered as a book that they like.
It's a sort of tragic campus novel about a Midwest professor.
His other book, Augustus, won the National Book Award in 1972, and it's an epistolary novel about Augustus Caesar.
And then there's this book, which I read, Butcher's Crossing, which is a Western, and that's kind of the canon of John Williams as a writer.
So there is an earlier book, apparently, which is no longer in print.
So he's a very strange writer in that regard.
They're three very, very different books.
But Butcher's Crossing, which is the one I read and was very impressed by, is a kind of take on the Western where a young man from New York or from the East Coast kind of reads Ralph Waldo Emerson and becomes kind of enlivened by these ideas of going out to the West and getting in touch with nature and discovering himself.
And so he does so, and he gets involved in this horrific buffalo skin caper where they're going to go to this valley and collect all these buffalo skins.
And it's a bit like Moby Dick in the sense that you learn a lot about how to skin a buffalo, how to keep the skin, all the kind of... You know, in Moby Dick, there's all those chapters about keeping the blubber and all of that.
It's very graphic about how buffalo work, but at the end, it's a sort of story about the decline of the West because...
Without giving too much away, it all comes to a disaster largely because America has moved on.
And this idea of manifest destiny and transcendental connection with the great American plains is a thing of the past, even in the book is set in the 19th century.
And it all ends up in disillusionment.
But I love Westerns and this has been one of the best books I've read in a long time.
No, I haven't.
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