"Augustus" and "Butcher's Crossing" by Jon Williams

Having been enchanted by John Williams brilliant novel “Stoner”, I read his “Augustus” and Butcher’s Crosssing” recently. Neither is as perfectly executed as “Stoner” – but both are well worth the time.

“Augustus” is an epistolary novel about the life and times of the Roman Emperor. Part of the fun is that quite a few of the letters are penned by famous artists, poets, and historians: Livy, Vergil, Maecenus, Nicolaus of Damascus and more. Each writes in his own style – as do the famous historical figures such as Marc Anthony, Cleopatra, Marcus Agrippa, Julia and Livia. Cicero “writes” a couple of the letters – and those of the others often conform to one of Cicero’s “oratorical styles”.

It took me a while to get used to the names (I’m not a classical scholar). Livia is treated more kindly here than in “I Claudius”. I thought the ending here (and in Butcher’s Crossing) was a little (although just a little) heavy-handed, compared to the technical perfection of “Stoner”.

Butcher’s Crossing is a Western – about a Harvard boy (Andrews) who heads West to learn about himself and nature, inspired by Emerson. He hooks up (can I still say that?) with a buffalo hunter and mountain man named Miller, who knows of a secret valley in the Colorado mountains that still teems with buffalo. Their adventures in the valley are tense, bloody, horrific, and thrilling. In the end, the venture is an economic failure, but, perhaps, Andrews has found what he sought. The novel has been compared to “Blood Meridian” as a sort of anti-Western – a new, honest approach to looking at America’s frontier. Personally, I think both novels fail in that regard – Blood Meridian seems to try too hard to shock the reader, and (to a lesser extent) so does “Butcher’s Crossing”. However, the insights into the psyche of a Mountain Man, and the contradictions Miller represents make for a very good novel, as do the Western Adventures.

Read “Stoner” first –if you haven’t. Then read these two.