Doc: A Novel by Mary Doria Russell

[warriorofworry]

“When he arrived in Dodge City in 1878, Dr. John Henry Holliday was a frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who wanted nothing grander than to practice his profession in a prosperous Kansas cow town.  Hope – cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box --- smiled on him gently all that summer.”
At its best, “Doc” exemplifies Russell’s work as both elegy and advocacy of the refugee.  A southern boy fleeing the effects of the Civil War, his mother’s death, and the humid Georgia weather that exacerbated his worsening tuberculosis, Doc Holliday wanted only to breathe – and exercise his not-inconsiderable dental skills.  Russell gently humanizes but never lionizes the iconic black-hatted villain of the Wild Wild West. 
Holliday isn’t the only refugee in the maelstrom of personalities, money and politics that is Dodge City.  Russell deftly distills the locale and people from fable to dusty, sometimes bloody, reality.   Unlike many western tales, the women are given at least as much attention as the men, even if, in the end, their motives are equally inscrutable. 
I’ve said elsewhere that I am not particularly fond of the third person omniscient voice which Russell uses here.  Too often that narrative voice becomes a personality of its own.  Here, it’s unobtrusive and serves only to insert the reader into the story, ghostlike, beside the characters.
If you could only read one book this year, this is one I'd recommend enthusiastically.