Whiskey When We're Dry

Whiskey When We're Dry by John Larison is a big western novel set in the 1880's in a state somewhere near Colorado. Its protagonist is a hardscrabble teenage girl, recently orphaned, on a quest to find her outlaw older brother. Larison is a proud Oregon State MFA grad and instructor, and this fine novel has attracted notice in Hollywood, where its story has been acquired by the same people that made the new Planet of the Apes reboots. If the film (or TV adaptation) follows the book at all, it will be fast-paced, violent, and surprising.

Whiskey When We're Dry is balanced in that the action never lags. The setting would change every page and a half or so, but the writing wasn't gimmicky--ending each chapter with cliffhangers, for example. But because it moved so quickly, it felt light and cinematic. I was reminded of the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar! or Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! While the novel mercifully lacked an exclamation point in the title, it often was as breezy as those films. All three works were masterfully made, with consistent and inviting voices, but Whiskey When We're Dry achieved a greater depth in its high stakes, eventually inhabiting the territory of Cormac McCarthy or Herman Melville. Actually, the closest comparison I can think of is another great western, John Williams's Butcher's Crossing. In that novel, a young transcendentalist heads west and, after unspeakable violence and calamity, becomes a cold-blooded early modernist. Both novels are adventurous. Both include coming-of-age protagonists. And both use the vehicle of the western novel to transport the reader into much darker and introspective places.