West

November 15, 2017

Davies offers a slender but capaciously conceived debut novel about a recently widowed mule breeder who buries his grief by departing Pennsylvania for the great frontier, where the discovery of mammoth animal bones is sparking imaginations. Alas, he leaves behind young daughter Bess to tend the farm. Davies won the 2015 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award.

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February 15, 2018
In the early 19th century, a man quests into the American West and finds a world teetering between extinction and dreams.A decade or so after the Lewis and Clark expedition, John Cyrus Bellman, a widower and mule breeder, reads in the newspaper of the discovery of "monstrous bones...sunk in the salty Kentucky mud" and is convinced that "the same gigantic monsters still [walk] the earth in the unexplored territories of the west." Promising to write frequently, Bellman leaves his preteen daughter, Bess, on his Pennsylvania farm and heads west. What follows is the story of Bess' waiting and Bellman's wandering; the story of the letters Bellman sends and their unlucky eastward journeys; the story of Bellman's guide, "an ill-favored, narrow-shouldered Shawnee boy who bore the unpromising name of Old Woman From A Distance" and whose tribe--after being harassed by settlers and paid off in trinkets--has recently undertaken its own less-voluntary western migration. Bess dreams of her father's return while struggling to evade the predatory attentions of two local men. Bellman, a soft-spoken Ahab, suffers winters "harder than he'd thought possible" yet remains enthralled by "the notion that...there were always things...you hadn't dreamed of." Old Woman From A Distance is at once "angry about the past, but ambitious for the future" and must eventually decide whether to undertake a quest of his own. Welsh author Davies' (The Redemption of Galen Pike, 2017, etc.) slim, complex, and achingly beautiful first novel is a sculpture of daring shifts and provocative symmetries welded together by lyrical, fast-paced prose. Davies dispenses with troublesome thousand-mile wildernesses in a sentence and dashes between the minds of both principal and ancillary characters. The result is a choral performance, reminiscent of those by Penelope Fitzgerald: The reader enjoys a story far greater in its sweep and better-linked in its causes than any of that story's participants can appreciate. Deployed on the stage of the midlapsarian American frontier, Davies' chorus manages to weave threads of myth and hope into the gnarly chords of historical tragedy.A masterful first novel--the sort of book that warms even as it devastates, that forces serious reflection and yet charms.

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February 19, 2018
In her transfixing first novel, Davies (author of the story collection The Redemption of Galen Pike) tells a stark story about exploration and extinction on the American continent. Driven by wanderlust to leave his small British village, Cy Bellman sets up a mule farm in rural Pennsylvania in the early 19th century. Reports of the discovery of large fossils in the Kentucky mud, “bones... that were bleached and pale and vast, like a wrecked fleet or the parched ribs of a church roof,” kindles his imagination more than his farm’s jennies and jacks: “it seemed possible that, through the giant animals, a door into the mystery of the world would somehow be opened.” Davies conveys the simultaneous ridiculousness and nobility of Bellman’s obsession, which compels this Don Quixote in a stovepipe hat to leave his daughter to determine whether mammoth beasts still wander the nation’s vast western expanse. Bell’s Sancho Panza is a teenage Shawnee orphan girl hired to guide the strange man in his search. Their haphazard, perilous, and occasionally dreamlike traipse is mesmerizing, as is the complex relationship that develops between the two. Though the ending may come across as formulaic, it is nonetheless dramatically satisfying and doesn’t detract from this otherworldly novel. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency.