If you are looking for a present for a colleague, this is a reasonable option. It is indeed largely inoffensive (though reactionary and mildly racist), mostly reasonably written and hits enough of the right emotional beats (think Lifetime movie) to offer a pleasant overall reading experience. I find it really hard to come up with reasons why you should pick up this book – unless you want an inoffensive book present. In many ways, Jiles, writing in a genre that has been constantly modernized and updated in the past decades, offers a quietly reactionary take on many of the themes of the Western. Jiles’ novel is different – that much is true, but it is not necessarily an important or worthwhile difference. This novel in particular raises themes variously treated by novels like True Grit, The Sisters Brothers, or Lonesome Dove, and by movies like The Searchers. This is partly due to the material – it is enormously hard to do something interesting with the Western that hasn’t been done before, and been done better. This is not a bad novel, but it is also not a very good one. There is a sense of Jiles understanding her material, working with cliché and tropes to do something that’s certainly unique enough to deserve recognition.
News of the World is tighter, more well written and sharper than much of the seemingly poetic guff that gets turned out by many of the MFA institutions around the US. It is certainly the kind of writing that lures some reviewers and readers into calling it poetic. Vollmann has offered a thorough, accurate and uncharitable assessment this year.
Annie Proulx’ novels, of which William T. Deliberate – in a way that reminds me of the writing in E. Certainly, much of the writing in the novel is deliberate, albeit without the care and elegance you’ll find, for example, in Brian Evenson’s most recent book The Warren. The sentence I quoted, stylistically, isn’t atypical of the novel’s style. News of the World is a widely-praised work of fiction after all, turning up on end-of-the-year lists, shortlisted for the National Book Award and more.
“Some people were born unsupplied with a human conscience and those people needed killing.” – If you think this is a great sentence, many of my criticisms of Paulette Jiles’ novel in my review will not apply to you as a reader. Jiles, Paulette (2016), News of the World, William Morrow
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