Since 2016, the Trump administration has been in the process of reversing one hundred different environmental rules, eliminating national monuments, loosening restrictions on drilling for oil and gas, rescinding water pollution regulations, gutting protections for various animal species, ignoring tribal sovereignty-in general, promoting the culture of depredation that made the West so appealing to settlers in the first place. Meanwhile, our present government appears intent on institutionalizing the Bundy family’s disregard for both the public and the public’s land. Cliven Bundy’s refusal to pay grazing fees, and his family’s fomentations of armed uprisings against federal authority, evince a contemporary version of the violent and opportunistic settler of yore.

Though the 1890 census declared the frontier officially closed, the notion of the frontier as an endlessly exploitable horizon has endured in our national consciousness. Today, the West hasn’t abandoned its myths it’s merely adapted them. These tropes are both the region’s and our nation’s myths-tales that authorize a settler-colonial culture of rapacious extraction and terrible violence. Elsewhere, the genre recycles quests for gold, escapes from the law, and heroic conquests of land, savages, and beasts.

It trafficks in cowboys and cattle drives, sheriffs and shoot-outs, vicious “Indians” and their ritual banishment. That genre doesn’t speak to the West as a place with a distinct history but instead to the cheap ideals and popular tropes that helped Anglos seize and settle the terrain. The region’s literature has suffered from the pollution of the dime-store romance, stick-figure protagonists, and inflated adventure narratives that Hollywood codified into the Western genre. There is a dearth of great contemporary novels that deal with the most crucial themes of the West: bloody expansion, toxic machismo, immigration, atomizing individualism, and the plunder of nature and people. Plenty of great Western novels have been written, both then and in the interim.

John Williams, himself the author of the exceptional Western novel Butcher’s Crossing (an early precursor to the “anti-Western,” and predictive, in its violence and subversive plotting, of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian), poses the observation as a question in his 1961 essay “The ‘Western’: Definition of the Myth,” which appeared in The Nation: “Why has the West not produced its equivalent of New England’s Melville or Hawthorne-or, in modern times, of the South’s Faulkner or Warren?” The notion that the western United States has failed to foster exceptional fiction invested in the essence of the region is an observation particular (or so it would seem) to a certain type of elder statesman of the American West, in consideration of a particular type of establishment literary art.

On swift horses a novel