The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones
Staff Rec
This Western has more sea lions than any other I've read. It's also got a looping approach to time and story - the titular, Billy the Kid-esque character is already dead, as are several more besides, and so the drunk, melancholy narrator may as well tell you the events now as later. An important book in the literary and cinematic history of the revisionist Western, and a bloody, haunting, often oddly lovely novel.
- Nora
The 1950s classic that rewrote the myth of the American West and inspired its subsequent chroniclers from Sam Peckinpah to Marlon Brando to Cormac McCarthy.
Hendry Jones isn't quite Billy the Kid, but he's "the Kid" all the same, and like Billy's his story doesn't take long to tell. He'll do a fair amount of killing, be done in by an old friend, then get turned into a myth before his body is cold. Years later, one of the Kid's last living partners in crime, "Doc" Baker--old and less than sober--tries to set the record straight: who killed who and why, and how none of that old craziness is worth swooning over or rehashing. Except that Doc is a bit of a poet despite himself, and in drawing together what he knows and remembers about the Kid's last days, he winds up saying just about everything that needs to be said about the American West, about kids playing with guns, about boys playing at being men out on the frontier, where they thought no one was watching.
As Will Oldham--whose moniker as a musician, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, was partly inspired by Billy the Kid--notes in his introduction, Hendry Jones served as fodder for a field of artists grappling with masculinity and violence in the West: Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian are all impossible to imagine without Neider's Kid having first blazed the trail. A concise and brutal modern masterpiece, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is one of the few Western novels worthy of the name.