The Master Tanner Heads West

Fiction. Oddly, the dark star of this darkly comic novel set in the late 1800s isn't the master tanner, but the tanner's wife, Dolly, a sensuous and level-headed woman who sees the West for what it is: a land of violence, yes; but also a land of blank deserts signifying opportunity. So while her husband gets his head trapped inside a dead buffalo's skull, Dolly maneuvers through a monomaniacal Slavic emigre acting as town sheriff, a photographer named Swing T whose "spiritual journey" masks murderous sadism, a one-eyed poetic smith, and a star-gazing gambler who puts out the smith's eye with a hole card in self-defense. With colorful characters and a compelling and surprising plot, Bamberger's first novel surely echoes our present age as much as it does our westward expansion.