Actually Pretty Good: Pity the Beast

Robin McLean puts the wild in wild West

Most contemporary fiction is awful. Actually Pretty Good highlights new books that are, like the title says, Actually Pretty Good!

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“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” - William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Rules, as they say, are meant to be broken, and Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast is a book that’s interested in breaking as many as possible. To put it somewhat simply, this is a book where the section breaks actually mean something, where they don’t so much act as a short pause as much as a signpost that you will be heading somewhere completely different. Pity The Beast is a book full of choices that would make the lamest person in your MFA workshop wrinkle their brow and wonder, hesitantly, why you did that there. McLean just does it, switching perspectives (and species) midparagraph like Ken Kesey, snarling her syntax in a Faulknerian way that Cormac McCarthy could only dream of, and shifting the book from the present to the distant past and future like some sort of cowboy Le Guin. That it all works speaks to McLean’s talents: you can break any literary rule if you’re good enough. Or, alternatively, you can do all this if you’re wearing a big cowboy hat in your author photo. Any meekness and you’d look awful silly in a ten-gallon.

Robin McLean, author photo by Melissa Guerra

Pity the Beast starts with immediate tension, in the way that only Westerns get to do. Ginny, our main character, has cheated on her husband, Dan, but there’s still work to be done around the ranch. In your average everyday domestic novel, a couple in the midst of such a rift would avoid one another, someone would get a hotel room or go to their mother’s place, there’d be some space to ‘work out’ whatever’s happened in the marriage. Maybe someone would even have a sort of epiphanic realization during their time apart, or, if you’re as twisted as John Updike, kill a baby. Not so out on the ranch, as the daily rhythms of Western life require Dan and and Ginny to work together, gruelingly, in close quarters. A mare on the farm is struggling in labor with an ill-fated filly, and Dan and Ginny have to construct - fittingly enough to start a book - a sort of monstrous wooden edifice to lift the horse off the ground and wait out the birth. A crowd of neighbors begins to form, nominally to help with the horse, but mostly to gawk at the tension between Dan and Ginny. Well, it sure does get dark at night, and the tension at the party - or whatever you want to call the get-together - curdles into something drunken and altogether more nasty. Dan and Ginny’s sister Ella and a couple other ‘friends’ get their form of brutal revenge on Ginny, leaving her for dead in a pit as the revelry continues.

Hangovers are never great, but the “we tried to kill Ginny” one hits Dan, Ella, and crew pretty hard, as they discover that not only has Ginny survived but also escaped the property. To add insult to injury, the local deputy has a couple suspicions about what happened that night. Thus begins an extended chase, as Ginny leads a crew of her trackers into the mountains, further and further into the wilderness. Here the book goes from Western convention to something altogether more Canadian, with the epiphanic North replacing the epiphanic West, not so much a neo-western as an anti/wilderness survival story a la another recently feted book, Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance. Things get woolier and woolier the further up you go, and Ginny is determined to lead her would-be-captors into a place where the question is not ‘can you catch me’ but ‘can you live.’ This is a journey book with no return, just a gradual drawing into death. 

The word ‘chase’ in the previous paragraph may have elicited visions in your head of classic Westerns where bands of men ride fast horses day by day over vast distances, but the chase here is much more deliberate and realistic. Dan and Ella hire a professional to track down Ginny, and they ride well provisioned, a mule train carrying their gear. This deliberateness in pace allows for the cat-and-mouse game between the parties to grow and deepen, as the lines blur between who is exactly chasing who. Add in that pesky greenhorn deputy, and you’ve got at least three parties keeping various tabs on one another, moving in strange paths with unexpected intersections. 

Speaking of strange paths, McLean seems to take pleasure in wrongfooting the reader throughout the novel, switching perspectives and timeframes at whim. That mule train I mentioned before? Each mule has their own personality, and we’re treated to the spiritual sermons of one in particular. Like I said, the section breaks matter; one second you’re in a tense standoff, the next you’re getting “Mule Thought #3”:

“What is a mechanical beast then, the red jenny mulled, if a flock of birds is? She was lecturing again about respect. Name one creature that could not be reduced in that way. What rock? What mountain? What wave? What in the universe could not be thus reduced? Is this reduction required by the thinker to feel alive?”

When we’re not in the primordial past of the land - when the animals lorded over the woods without any of the petty drama of the humans - we’re in some far-off future, as scientists and surveyors of the future take stock of our waterlogged world, finding specimens of whatever remains of the land after the upcoming series of climate catastrophes has its way. McLean is also a Pynchonian register-shifter, as the language of all the received myth of the West seeps into the writing, all the bravado of the dime store paperback and the manic energy of the TV serial imbued into the narrative before it is unraveled. You’ll get, in the span of twenty pages or so, an encounter between Ginny and her pursuers, written pitch perfectly so you know exactly who has a gun pointed at who, and then a hard cut to the deputy’s green, strangely poetic impressions of the West in a postcard to his mother: 

“‘Howdy’ Mom – ‘Here’ is a little Cowtown under Big Sky – Not there now / ‘riding / fill you in later – Can’t be same sky as NJ – Not your planet – Bet you’re fine – I’m in ‘The Big Window’ – been aching for it – won’t die in cubicle - NO - Locals ok but ‘rough around the edges’ – Outsiders are required to really SEE – Dull coarse men/clever woman – Gotta ride on–”

And then, new section, and now for something completely different, the cheap melodramatist huckster’s welcome to the show spiel: 

“Speaking of which, ain’t it time for another rip-roaring episode of the The Long Trail of That There Kid? Today we’re proud as heck to bring you an installment we like to call ‘A Blister Is a State of Mind.’ (And remember, this play is presented for your complete relaxation – if you feel like hissing the villain, go to it – it’s okay with us!” 

It’s exhilarating not only to keep up with all these different storylines and story types, but also to watch as McLean keeps all these plates spinning. It’s one thing to experiment, and a whole ‘nother thing to actually succeed, to build a coherent and powerful story around the disparate parts. Again, it’s a sign of that authorial confidence that comes with, metaphorically speaking, wearing the cowboy hat. Pity the Beast’s varying layers of narrative - over time, character, and species - make for a one-of-a-kind palimpsest. The grand ambition of the book creates its own wilderness to step into, one where there is no division between what’s come and what is to come, not when the world is looked onto with such scope. The past is future, the future past, and we readers are lucky to have overlapped in our time with Robin McLean and Pity the Beast, which can ascend into the canon of the weird Western alongside Butcher’s Crossing, Warlock, True Grit, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Christ Versus Arizona, and In the Distance. And hey, even luckier for us, she’s got another book coming out in October.

You can buy Pity the Beast from your local bookstore, check it out from your local library, or order it from Bookshop.org, where every purchase supports local booksellers across the country. (And possibly me as well if they ever approve me as an affiliate.)