Doc: A Novel

4.5 stars. I think Russell resonates with me because, like her, I was raised Catholic; and I was extensively educated by Jesuits. that background gave me a keen sensitivity to human suffering and a consciousness that western religion can never live up to its own expectations or rules in the face of suffering. The Sparrow hit me hard in light of all this, and when I recently learned she’d written some historical fiction about Doc Holiday and the Earps, I thought, excellent, let me see what she does with it. And what she’s done is masterful. This isn’t at all a book about guns or gunfighting, though I enjoy both topics. It’s a snapshot of an era and milieu as revealed by the character of a few women and men. It’s outstanding.

DOC, Mary Doria Russell's novel of Doc Holliday in Dodge City, a couple years BEFORE the notorious shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, was, quite simply, a fascinating read.

Painstakingly researched and beautifully written, it was a book I hated to put down, but since it ran nearly 400 pages, I was forced to take breaks occasionally, which gave me time to consider all the historical and biographical information woven so expertly and seamlessly into the story of one year in the life of Dr. John Henry Holliday in wild and wooly Dodge City, Kansas. His early association with the Earp brothers and Bat Masterson is prominently featured, and we learn that Holliday was actually closer to Morgan Earp than he ever was to Wyatt, who is show more presented here as honest, humorless, stolid, dependable, and maybe just a bit on the dim side, if not illiterate. Younger brother Morgan, on the other hand, enjoyed books and often discussed Dostoevsky, Dickens and other writers with Doc, an educated 'southern gentleman' starved for such talk.

I've seen most of the movies about the Earps and Doc Holliday, and was a kid fan of the fifties TV show, "Wyatt Earp." ("Long live his fame / And long live his glory / And long may his story be told!")

Strong-jawed actor Hugh O'Brien as Wyatt Earp was presented as a dandy, with black frock coat, flat brimmed hat, string tie and gold brocade vest, etc. Well, according to Russell, that would better describe Dodge's Sherrif Bat Masterson, a short fat dandy who made money on the side by promoting, refereeing and betting on illegal bare-knuckle boxing matches outside the city limits. (And yeah, I remember actor Gene Barry too, tall, slim and miscast as Masterson in that TV show.) About the only thing the TV show got right about Wyatt was his stern, unsmiling demeanor, which, we learn from Russell, was partly because as a child he was brutally beaten by his violent father, leaving him without any front teeth.
Doc fixed this, by making Wyatt a bridge, finally allowing him to smile and even laugh a little without feeling self-conscious. (And didja know that such bridges and dental devices in those times (1878) were often fashioned from real human teeth gathered from the battlefields of the Civil War?) And remember that cool long-barreled Buntline Special six-shooter O'Brien's Wyatt packed? Nope. Pure fiction, according to Russell. (Shucks, all of us kids wanted one of those guns.)

A surprise character here, to me, was comic song-and-dance man, Eddie Foy, who was playing that year at the Comique ('Commie-Q') Saloon in Dodge. His inclusion in DOC brought back memories of that classic fifties film, THE SEVEN LITTLE FOYS, starring Bob Hope as Foy.

So there is plenty of myth-busting by Russell in DOC, but it's handled in a most enjoyable and educational way. And didja know that Doc Holliday was actually a not-too-distant cousin of Margaret Mitchell, and that she actually used parts of the Holliday family history in writing GONE WITH THE WIND? Now THAT I found very interesting.

But the real, beating heart of DOC is found in the portrayal of his off-and-on years-long relationship with the fiery, high-born, highly educated, multi-lingual Hungarian prostitute, Maria Katarina Harony, or 'Kate.' Because the real John Henry Holliday is revealed in this relationship - the delicate boy who lost his mother to tuberculosis, the same insidious disease which would take Doc's own life after years of suffering. Doc and Kate were kindred souls who, by turns, comforted and tortured each other. And the scenes of Doc's 'bad spells' with the disease are disturbingly, graphically grim, as well as heartbreakingly ineffably sad, particularly when you know that it's a battle he cannot win.

But I go on and on, about a book that's already been reviewed and praised hundreds and hundreds of times. And most deservedly so. I absolutely LOVED this book and the way it made frontier Kansas come alive and countless disparate historical figures come together. Mary Doria Russell is one helluva writer. Very highly recommended. show less

I knew practically nothing about Dr. Holliday when I started this book. I had, of course, heard of Wyatt Earp as a prototypical Western lawman and of the Tombstone incident as a folkloric event, but otherwise, I had no preconceived notions of the historic figures involved in this novel, so I can’t say whether Russell succeeds in honoring or contradicting the usual versions of them. I did feel like these characters were real people, and I was surprised to note just how many of the characters were actually men and women who lived and died as the novel indicates.

And among those is our young dentist-hero: Russell had really done something special here. I’ve never experienced so viscerally just what it must have been like to live with show more tuberculosis; it’s often in the background of Victorian novels, but the sheer awfulness of the disease and the sense of impending doom it must give its sufferers was never as clear to me as it became in this novel. Though Holliday is not defined by his illness, it shapes him irreversibly, coloring his perceptions of the world and of those around him; he had “spent his entire adult life dying,” as Russell notes, and although that’s true of us all, we rarely know it so well.

But this book isn’t all about dying; it’s also very much about living and what it meant to live in the West, what the appeal of that nebulous and ever-shifting borderland was to those who haunted the borderlands of civilization. And, yes, it’s about lovely writing, too; Russell is the sort of author whose prose begs for adjectives like “lyrical” and “haunting,” though as it’s nearly all in the service of plot and characterization, I’ve no objections. Purple passages do bore me, as a rule, but once I’m immersed in a character’s life, they become enjoyable. By the end, I had nearly brought to tears on several occasions, and I felt a little sad to leave these people who died a hundred years before I was born. That’s the best, I think, that can be said for historical fiction–that it makes the people who preceded us feel just as real as ourselves and makes their choices and lack thereof as real as our own. I guess maybe it’s about perspective and empathy. Whatever it is, I very much appreciated it in this novel.

(I ramble a bit more here.) show less

Audio book performed by Mark Bramhall

John Henry “Doc” Holliday was educated, a Southern gentleman, an accomplished pianist, a compassionate dentist, a gambler, and tubercular. Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Morgan and James, were the proof that sons raised by a bully will either follow in his footsteps or rebel by becoming champions of the downtrodden. These iconic figures of the American West are forever linked by the events of one afternoon in Tombstone Arizona. But this book introduces us to the real men behind the legend, giving us their backgrounds from childhood to a year spent in Dodge – a city on the edge of the frontier, but where fortunes could be made servicing the cowboys who drove cattle to market. Saloons, brothels, show more hotels, restaurants, stables, racetracks, boxing rings, poker games, banks and retail stores all flourished. Doc went there because “that’s where the money is.” And Wyatt Earp, along with his brothers and Bat Masterson maintained the peace.

Russell certainly did her homework in crafting this work. She gives us a real place and real people who are every bit as colorful and fantastic as the legends they became. I love the way she drew these characters, letting them unfold little by little, much as we would get to know someone over time. And still she held back a surprise or two to stun us. Her prose is so evocative; several times I exclaimed aloud, “Oh!” In this respect, especially I have to give some of the credit to Mark Bramhall’s performance of the audio book. I felt he was drowning in fluid as he voiced Doc in the throes of an attack. I felt Wyatt’s embarrassment, Morgan’s thoughtfulness, Kate’s impatience and fear, everyone’s love of Doc. This is a book that even non-fans of Westerns will be able to appreciate and enjoy. show less

Doc is Mary Doria Russell's attempt to write about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp as they might have been—from what little I know of the history of the American West, she seems to play a little loose with the historical truth at times, but it's all in service of a wonderful evocation of time, place and character. The novel concentrates mostly on the time spent by the men and their circle of family and friends in Dodge City, Kansas, in the late 1870s, long before they ever heard of the O.K. Corrall. The Holliday and Earp evoked here are both memorable characters, but I especially appreciated that Russell also spent a lot of time surrounding them with fully-fleshed out female characters. The one thing I didn't so much care for was that the show more novel's plot, such as it is, comes from the murder of a teenage boy, John Horse Sanders, who is of both Black and Seminole descent. While it's undeniable that it was tough to be non-white in that time and place, I wanted more of a presence for non-white characters as something other than a means of showing the (relative) nobility of some white men. show less

I am NOT the sort of person who reads or watches Westerns. I vaguely knew Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, The OK Corral and "Get out of Dodge" as concepts, but I could probably only give you a 50-50 bet on whether they were fictional or not, and I certainly had no clue that they were connected. That the OK Corral was a shootout completely exhausts my a priori knowledge of all things Western.

But, Mary Doria Russell is one of those authors for me. If I could only read one book for the rest of my life, it would probably be The Sparrow, so I wasn't going to let something like a genre get in my way. That was a good move on my part. Doc is filled with rich, vivid characters. None of them are better than they ought to be, but none of them are show more caricatured lawless villains either. Doc is my favorite - quiet, quick to take insult, but quicker still to lend a helping hand, proud and frail, but simple, virtuous Wyatt and temperamental, brilliant, very rarely tender Kate are also beautifully depicted. To say nothing of a host of supporting characters.

I am, by nature, partial to cleft lip/palate stories, and Russell's description of Holliday's cleft repair and his diction difficulties following is precision embodied. It goes without saying, given that Russell taught anatomy at my own alma mater, that her treatment of historical dentistry leaves nothing to be desired. This is, after all, a Russell novel, so it is meticulous in detail, flawlessly researched, accurate to a T.

Of course, there are original characters, who, of course, include a Jesuit and multi-ethnic characters who challenge our understanding of race and racial relations. These characters flirt with being a little too perfect, especially in light of their historic setting, but overall add to the flavor (shockingly, there is no unlikely Jew of even more unlikely ethnic extraction. I kept waiting for it.)

My only criticism is that, for people like me who come naive to Westerns, the book almost completely omits the OK Corral and the events directly leading up to it. Since it represents everything I will ever know about the genre, probably for the rest of my life, I would have liked Russell's take on that central piece of the Doc Holliday mythos. Nonetheless, it is by far the best book I have read that heavily features Nevadan prostitutes this month (*cough* The Lonely Polygamist *cough*_ show less

“When he arrived in Dodge City in 1878, Dr. John Henry Holliday was a frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who wanted nothing grander than to practice his profession in a prosperous Kansas cow town. Hope – cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box --- smiled on him gently all that summer.”
At its best, “Doc” exemplifies Russell’s work as both elegy and advocacy of the refugee. A southern boy fleeing the effects of the Civil War, his mother’s death, and the humid Georgia weather that exacerbated his worsening tuberculosis, Doc Holliday wanted only to breathe – and exercise his not-inconsiderable dental skills. Russell gently humanizes but never lionizes the iconic black-hatted villain of the Wild Wild West.
Holliday show more isn’t the only refugee in the maelstrom of personalities, money and politics that is Dodge City. Russell deftly distills the locale and people from fable to dusty, sometimes bloody, reality. Unlike many western tales, the women are given at least as much attention as the men, even if, in the end, their motives are equally inscrutable.
I’ve said elsewhere that I am not particularly fond of the third person omniscient voice which Russell uses here. Too often that narrative voice becomes a personality of its own. Here, it’s unobtrusive and serves only to insert the reader into the story, ghostlike, beside the characters.
If you could only read one book this year, this is one I'd recommend enthusiastically. show less